The London Hotel Bars Actually Worth Drinking At
From the Connaught to the Kettner's revival — where hotel drinking still means something in W1.
The brief
The hotel bar is the most underused room in London. No booking, no queue, a bartender who has made ten thousand of whatever you're about to order, and somebody else's furniture bill.
Mayfair
5 Hertford Street if you know a member. Sketch for a drink in the Glade before dinner and the most photographed toilets in Europe afterwards. The grand hotels along Park Lane keep bartenders who will make you something off-menu if you tell them what you like.
Soho
Café Boheme is not a hotel bar but behaves like one — pavement table, martini, dinner reservation you're about to be late for. The Broadwick upstairs for velvet, low light and a drink poured with real precision.
Bloomsbury and Marylebone
The quiet ones. Fischer's for a Viennese aperitif at four in the afternoon, which is the most sophisticated thing you can do in W1 on a weekday.
How to use them
Go early — six o'clock, before the dinner crowd. Sit at the bar, not a table. Order a martini or a highball and judge the room on how well it makes the simplest thing on the list.