The Restaurant
Cycene — pronounced 'kitchen' in Old English — opened in October 2022 inside Blue Mountain School at 9 Chance Street in Shoreditch, occupying the four-storey concept space that previously held the influential restaurant Mãos. Chef Theo Clench, whose CV runs through Trinity in Clapham, The Clove Club a few streets away, Portland in Fitzrovia, and Akoko on Berners Street, was awarded a Michelin star six months after opening — one of the fastest stars in recent London memory. The dinner is structured as a deliberate 'promenade': welcome drinks and a first course in the ground-floor bar; a brief stop in the open kitchen to meet the team; the principal eight-course progression in the third-floor dining room — a single eighteen-cover table beneath a Donald Judd-influenced sculptural ceiling installation.
The cooking style is anchored in East Asian and Australasian techniques applied to British and European produce — Clench's training included senior time at Estela in New York under Ignacio Mattos as well as the Japanese cooking sensibilities he absorbed at Akoko. Signature courses across the 2025–26 menu have included a hand-dived Orkney scallop with a Japanese soy-and-sesame koji; a Cornish day-boat turbot grilled over binchotan with a Pernod butter; a Welsh saltmarsh lamb shoulder slow-cooked with miso and quince; a hen-of-the-woods mushroom with a fermented black-bean glaze; and a Yorkshire rhubarb and brown-butter ice cream that has become the kitchen's most-photographed plate. The menu rotates with the seasons; petit fours arrive back in the ground-floor bar at the end of service.
The wine programme is short by Mayfair standards — about 220 references — but exceptionally deliberate. Particular depth in Japanese sake (the largest grower-led list at this level in London), a focused natural-wine section, and a strong Australian and New Zealand white selection that mirrors the cooking's Pacific influences. Pairings are offered at £140 (classic) and £180 (rare). The Blue Mountain School building itself — a contemporary-art-and-design space selected by Karl Kemp — adds a layer that the city's senior tasting rooms do not have: the architecture, the art, and the menu all read as a single composed evening.
Why This Is London’s First Date Pick
For a first date in London that wants to do more than confirm two adults can eat a meal together, Cycene delivers an entire choreographed evening. The promenade format — bar, kitchen, dining room — generates natural moments of movement and conversation that a static dining room cannot. The eighteen-cover dining room is intimate without being claustrophobic. The Blue Mountain School building's art and design programme gives the conversation an immediate post-dinner topic that does not require returning to the small talk of work or weather. And the East-Asian-and-Australasian menu sensibility reads as more culturally curious than the standard Mayfair French tasting evening — a subtle signal that the date is interested in things beyond the obvious.
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