[title]
Tucked up on the roof of Selfridges are four beehives. Two of them are empty, because bees operate on a cycle and need to move into fresh premises every year. The other two contain 20,000 honey bees who head out to Hyde Park and other green spaces to do their thing. Soon you’ll be able to try the fruits of their labour at Hive, an all-day restaurant on Selfridges third floor where almost every dish is focused on honey.
Hive is the brainchild of Khalid Samata. He’s spent years perfecting both monofloral and polyfloral honeys (bees have a fixed radius of operation, so if you put your hives in the middle of fields of just one flower, you can control the taste of their honey, or create different flavours by controlling the number of species they have access to).
‘I fell in love with honey a few years ago,’ says Samata, ‘and I wanted to create awareness about this wonderful ingredient, and the critical importance of bees in our ecosystem.’ Hive is the result of this sommelier of the sweet stuff. Its drinks and dishes almost all contain honey, from simple breakfast dishes to a honey afternoon tea and more substantial plates such as monkfish with honey and polenta. It also appears in the cocktails, with a short, complex Mountain Tini featuring honey kombucha and a brilliantly sour Beezou Spritz with bitter honey liqueur and grapefruit. Better still was a tasting flight of four honeys, from a pale, almost colourless acacia, to a fiery buckwheat variety, the shade of hangover wee. There was also a chance to take spoonfuls of the stuff straight off the comb, with bits of beeswax sticking in your fillings.
Hive is a – as yet – unique proposition. There are really only two caveats. One, it’s in a bit of weird, shopping-centre-y space next to the ladies’ undies, so you can either face into the rather underwhelming room or spend your dinner looking at some sports bras, and two, it’s pretty spenny, with starters sound the £15 mark and mains twice that. And that feels like quite a lot for a restaurant in a ahop. Still, the food is good, the cocktails are better and the apiarist twist is best of all. Be great to taste London in every mouthful. Hopefully.
(Also, please appreciate the lack of puns constructed around the word ‘buzz’ in this piece.)
Hive, third floor, Selfridges, 400 Oxford St, W1A 1AB. Mon-Sat 10am-9pm, Sun 11am-6pm. www.hiverestaurant.uk