Café Lapérouse, The OWO

Café Lapérouse occupies the Grand Courtyard of The OWO, Raffles London's conversion of the former Old War Office in Whitehall. The Lapérouse name traces to the Left Bank restaurant that opened in Paris in 1766; Moma Group's own Café Lapérouse concept, first opened in Paris in 2021, unfolds here across three connected rooms, anchored by a freestanding glass and steel pavilion designed by DaeWha Kang Design.

The Pavilion is the room most visitors picture: a circular structure with a mirror-polished steel roof and a ribbed white ceiling that fans out from a central rooflight, evoking a Georgia O'Keeffe petal study. Floor-to-ceiling glass opens onto its own terrace, and a central bar sits beneath scalloped teal chairs and brushed columns, in a pale, nautical register that nods to the restaurant's namesake, the eighteenth-century French explorer Jean-François de Lapérouse. Beyond it, Salon Orient turns ruby and candlelit, with crystal chandeliers, dark tapestries and a resident pianist: the more intimate of the two rooms, kept for dinner.

The kitchen serves French classics (onion soup, snails, beef tartare) alongside luxe additions of truffle and caviar, with a serious cocktail list built around the Pavilion bar. The restaurant shares its courtyard with Raffles London at The OWO, reached most directly from Horse Guards Avenue.