L'Escargot

L'Escargot has stood at 48 Greek Street since 1927, which makes it the oldest French restaurant in London. Georges Gaudin opened the original room, Le Bienvenue, in 1896 and was the first restaurateur in England to put snails on the menu; when he took the Georgian townhouse on Greek Street his regulars renamed the place after his signature dish, and a snail farm ran in the basement for years. The building itself dates to 1741, and the restaurant has been a fixture of literary and theatrical Soho ever since, passing through the hands of Nick Lander and Jancis Robinson in the 1980s and Jimmy Lahoud and Marco Pierre White from 1998.

Four private rooms sit above the ground-floor dining room, each on its own floor and each with its own character. The Salon Vert is the largest, a first-floor antique room under an original moulded ceiling, hung with gilt mirrors and seating forty. The Library, panelled and lined with prints and portraits, takes thirty around its tables. The Blue Room, a deep-blue second-floor space, holds an intimate twelve. At the top of the house the Snail Bar opens under a glazed skylight, a plant-filled reception room with its own bar and a piano that takes sixty standing.

Rooms hire individually, or the whole townhouse can be taken for exclusive use. Its floors of self-contained rooms, a top-floor bar built for receptions and a central Soho address suit a private dinner that carries on into the evening.