Quarts into Pint Pots

Until the fairly recent arrival of financial musclemen like Terence Conran and Mr Poon of Harvey Nicks, purpose-built restaurants in London were very unusual. Some of the twentieth century’s grandest places – the Connaught, Coq d’Or (now Langan’s), L’Ecu de France, Prunier, Empress, the old Caprice and Mirabelle – had plenty of money behind them and could provide large dining rooms with smaller, but sufficient, back-of-house areas. If restaurateurs wanted to introduce competition to these behemoths they had to find what premises they could, most of which would be far from ideal, particularly given that most of central London – Soho, Covent Garden and St James’s, for example – was built in the eighteenth century. A great many of these properties were built as private houses so converting them to restaurants would have posed some interesting design problems, even before the days of mandatory customer lavatories, the demands of fire officers, EHOs, air conditioning and disabled access.