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Five of the best arty dining rooms in London
By Christina Makris | 6 January 2023 | Food & Drink
Christina Makris, author of Aesthetic Dining: The Art Restaurant Around the World, shares her five top private spaces in the British capital
Hosting a lunch or dinner in a private dining room is a joyous way to thank friends or clients, or just to ring in the New Year. Hiring a private room to share conversations and meals builds bonds with guests and creates memories, even personal histories. The backdrop to those celebrations is just as important as the food or drink enjoyed.
Here, Christina Makris, author of Aesthetic Dining: The Art Restaurant Around the World, shares her five top private rooms in London.
“Each of these venues provide an opportunity to feed your guests’ eyes and minds – as well as their stomachs,” she says. “These room includes historical works of art or design that enhance sensory appreciation of the private dining experience, and place diners in a truly delectable historical setting.”
The Ivy
Ever since it was established in 1917, the Ivy had been the original it-Restaurant, where actors, musicians, artists, and powerbrokers would go for their late-night reveries.
In its private dining room, British Royal Academician, Bill Jacklin’s mural, A Night at the Ivy portrays a busy, buzzy scene just like what you might be a part of when you dine there any night. The mural is a mirror onto the dining room itself in the way it captures an evening in the restaurant with diners including several the artist’s friends, his dealer Pierre Levai, the restaurateur and previous owner of the Ivy, Jeremy King, and the then waiter Jesus Adorno; now the most important Maître d’ in London. In preparing to make the work, Jacklin would go to the restaurant at night and sketch diners from his corner table. The mural even depicts another artwork by his peer Allen Jones in the composition, as well as many mirrors to remind diners that the theatre of seeing and being seen is part of the excitement of dining out.
Mount Street Restaurant
The new offering from Artfarm, the hospitality arm of world-renowned art gallery, Hauser & Wirth, The Mount Street Restaurant, is bedecked with important pieces of contemporary art from the artists and estates they represent, including Rashid Johnson, Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, and Balthus. The three floors above the restaurant are an assortment of private dining rooms, The Curious Rooms, available for hire. The Swiss Room celebrates the owner Iwan and Manuela Wirth’s Swiss heritage and their tradition of art and design. In the space, there is a hand-crafted European Oak floor finished by artisan Ian Harper, resembling the
watercolours of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and also features a series of her guache drawings above the entrance. There are also four works of the celebrated Swiss Symbolist artist, Ferdinand Hodler, an artist not often seen in British arts institutions, effectively rendering this dining room into a small museum for the artist. There are two Hodler pieces of females from 1911 and 1914, respectively, and two mountain landscapes from 1910 and 1911, all treated with the artist’s characteristically extended lines and ethereal colours transporting diners into a mysterious, yet natural, time and place.
Fortnum and Mason
The private dining room, the Boardroom dates to the late 1920s and has hosted a series of dining events, including a birthday meal for Winston Churchill, and a hungry Princess Margaret examining a collection of Yves Saint Laurent couture gowns in the room.
The Boardroom features Edwardian interior design by Walther Thornton Smith, who combined old and new furniture and textiles to create an eclectic opulence. Other quirky affects include a large silver tureen given to Admiral Lord Nelson after the Battle of the Nile in 1802 by Lloyds of London, engraved with his Arms, and an antique 19th Century Cantonese series of 8 watercolours depicting the different stages of tea cultivation. The piece de resistance is the large oil painting by the Parisian Academy painter William Bourguereau, Les Deux Soeurs (1898), representing two children sitting in a rural setting, sweetly smiling over diners painted in the artists’ characteristic luminous sheen and idealised composition. The work was purchased by Garfield Weston of the Weston Family who owned Fortnum and Mason and has been loaned to museum shows. The children no doubt are a reminder to diners take pleasure in the simple moments.
Scott’s
Scott’s is a symbol of quintessentially British, well-heeled London restaurant dining at its best. Its Platinum Arowana room, a dining space for 8, encases its diners on an illuminated agate floor, surrounds them in rose gold panelled walls, highlights them with Lalique crystal lighting. The room displays a collection of 18 museum-quality Modern artworks that include August Renoir’s Ne debout, Marc Chagall’s La Danse, Pissarro’s Portrait du Peintre Ludovic Piette, in addition to several other Modern contemporaries, including Joan Miró and Emile Bernard.
The collection is exquisite and when combined with the design of the room, makes diners feel like they are dining in a jewellery box. Proprietor and Caprice Holdings Chairman, Richard Caring scoured Modern art actions at Christie’s and Sothebys to find the right works for the room and take expressions of luxury, ease and comfort from the late 19th and early 20th Century and bring them to contemporary dining.
Langan’s
Peter Langan revolutionised the way Londoners experienced restaurant dining by tearing up the rulebook and replacing drab dining as a sense of duty, with a sexy, gregarious sense of ceremony. His brasserie on Stratton Street became both a celebrity haunt in the 1980s, however just as important as the divas and movie star patrons –such as Joan Collins, Muhammad Ali and Marlon Brando—were to the restaurant, its association with artists including as David Hockney, Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon and their creative spirit was also central to the environment of the restaurant.
Today, Langan’s has been reimagined and refurbished with a new art collection including contemporary artists such as Ella Kruglyanskaya, Michaela Yearwood Dan, Sonya Boyce, and Tracey Emin, among others. The history of Langan’s past is expressed in the series of photographs of parties and diners at Langan’s in the 1980s by Richard Young that decorate the private room. There are photographs of Elton John, Mick Jagger, and Stevie Wonder, as well as photographs of artists that frequented the Brasserie, such as Bacon and Hockney. The invitation for private diners to make their own history and memories in the restaurant when they dine there is quite forthcoming.