A CITY OF CLOSED DOORS
Illustrations by Zoë Barker
L ondon’s restaurants have never been better; the demand for them never greater. Discov- eries and bookings are digitised and democ- ratised at a previously unfathomable scale. But that culinary silver lining comes with some more practi- cal clouds. For one, try and get a short-notice table at any of the places on your list – in a city that con- spires against it at the best of times, spontaneity can feel all but dead. And secondly, it can leave those restaurateurs who had hoped to cultivate a crowd of returning regulars with a satisfied but transient, hype-chasing audience. So we’re seeing the start of some course-cor- rection – establishments implementing more locals-first measures that reflect a peculiar new atmosphere in the city’s hospitality offering broadly. For better or worse, we’ve entered an era where hot-ticket tables at sceney restaurants get allo- cated by Whatsapp; where carefree club nights are invitation-only; and where the most success- ful openings shun traditional publicity in favour of word-of-mouth murmurings, friendly committees and the social circles of charismatic front-people. It can feel like London is, in many ways, becoming a village of closed doors. Not simply because private members clubs are everywhere now. But because everywhere is borrowing from the private mem- bers club playbook, or so it seems. If such clubbish filters can sound undemocratic (and they can be), there are at least those with pure intentions. Benjy Leibowitz runs the Knave of Clubs in Shoreditch (one of the best London pub openings in recent years) with the lovely, but forever-booked, One Club Row above it – named, in a quirk of kismet, after the street it sits on. The convivial atmosphere of this room can be explained, he thinks, by a mantra he borrowed from New York restaurateur Gabe Stulman: “Look after your locals like celebrities and celebrities like locals.” It’s the neighbourhood regulars, Leibowitz says, who really conjure an enduring mood in a restaurant. “For us, it’s almost like a self-nominating club,” he says. “If you come in and have a really good time and you mention that to a member of our team, we’ll go out of our way to give you contact information to make it easier for you to come back. There’s something validating all-round about that.” These people, he says, are the ones that bring clubby familiarity to a place long after the A-listers, hype-chasers and big-spenders have departed – waving over tables to friends and other regulars. “And so, for us, as we move away from the buzz of year one, I think what’s needed is that we become a place that’s really part of people’s ongoing roster.” “That sense of curated connection – as opposed to just saying ‘we’re a community’ – is going to be the real differentiator now,” says Nadine Choe, who worked in real-estate private equity before starting the Stanza , a newsletter about the inner workings of the hospitality business. Of course, much has been made of the city’s actual members club boom. At the time of writing, there
“For us, it’s almost like a self- nominating club. If you come in and have a really good time and you mention that to a member of our team, we’ll go out of our way to give you contact information to make it easier for you to come back. There’s something validating all-round about that.”
are about 135 private members offerings in London, with at least a dozen more slated for opening this year. News arrives of clubs where clubs never thought to exist. Heralded Haggerston restaurant Planque has one. The revamped Ministry of Sound has one. Selfridges has one. Momentary PM Liz Truss is about to open one (it’ll cost 700 founder members £ 500 , 000 each, according to the Financial Times , and the salad is expected to be extra fresh). Indeed, even the French seem to be priz- ing fraternité over égalité; a new club called 16 Charles is about to open in a grand townhouse on Charles Street under the ownership of the Lou- lou Groupe, best known for Le Flandrin and Le Grand Café in Paris. And then there’s the rush of those opening in the wellness space. Tramp, the subterranean den of excess, is opening a sister entity underneath the Chancery Rosewood called Tramp Health – once a contradiction in terms.
“More clubs have opened in the past four years than in the three decades following the 1985 opening of The Groucho Club,” reads Knight Frank’s 2024 report into the phenomenon. Maybe these are simply the lengths we’re willing to go to so we can guarantee a late drink in the West End, but then the British have always been fond of organising themselves into useful boxes. “The impulse is that people want to be surrounded by people they really like, and to find places that they really identify with,” says Will Woodhams, a consultant to The Pembroke, the Belgravia superclub that will become London’s largest when it opens this autumn. And so, like much in the culture, we hark back fondly to pre-millennial offline moments. Over at At Sloane, the slinky Chelsea hotel that opened with winning understatement in 2023 , the most coveted evenings of the year are its Late Nights
– special late-license events that take the form, essentially, of ritzy basement house parties. For the first one, held in March 2025 , hotel staff invited 15 of their most interesting friends along and told them to invite about 10 people each. No tick- ets or velvet ropes or minimum spends or bottle service. It’s all charmingly impromptu. The events aren’t planned too far in advance, and there’s no strict schedule for when these nights might occur across the year. A source at the hotel tells me that this, effectively, is how things were done in the ’ 80 s and ’ 90 s – a time when the great bars, hotels and clubs of London were mostly owner-led, mean- ing the owner would be in residence most nights, subtly finessing the crowd and the mood. That charismatic central figure can be key, says Woodhams. “It’s how restaurants used to work. Peter Langan, when he ran Langan’s back in the day, was essentially running a club for people
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