The Wolseley City

The younger sibling of the Piccadilly original, opened on King William Street in the twentieth-anniversary year of The Wolseley. It occupies the ground floor of a 1920s former bank and department store building at the gateway to the Square Mile, and it is a considerably bigger room than its Mayfair forebear: a vaulted, colonnaded restaurant floor in monochrome marble, a café bar and three separate bar spaces, run in the tradition of grand European café dining. Where the original draws on Far Eastern references, the City room takes its motifs from ancient Egypt — striped columns, gilded cornicing, lotus capitals over the back bar.

Live music is part of the rhythm of the room: jazz plays Tuesday to Thursday evenings, a resident pianist and double bass take the Saturday afternoon sitting, and jazz returns to accompany Sunday lunch. Two private dining rooms, the Lombard and the Clement, sit off the main floor and can be combined for a larger private party, and a semi-private mezzanine overlooks the restaurant with its own bar. The whole restaurant is also available for exclusive hire.

We would use it for a City reception that wants the scale and theatre of a grand café room without leaving the Square Mile — the columned floor reads as an event space in its own right, and the mezzanine or a private dining room work for a tighter private gathering.