Hotel Café Royal - The London Hotel That Still Knows What It's For

I have walked into Hotel Café Royal four times now. Each time, I notice a different thing. This last visit it was the doorman: he asked us where we had come from before he asked us where we were going, and I think that detail tells you everything about how the building still works.

Most London hotels of this scale have lost the part of their job that has nothing to do with the room. They have stopped being able to receive a guest properly. Café Royal has not. That is the first thing a man should know about it before booking, because everything else flows from that — the reason the bar still has locals in it, the reason the spa is full at 7am with men who don’t live there, the reason you can walk in dressed badly and still be made to feel like you belong.

So that is the headline. Now I will tell you what is actually inside the building.

The room you sleep in

We took a Westminster Suite. They run from around forty-five square metres for the smaller versions, larger for the corner ones, and they sit on the Regent Street side of the building. The view is what you think it will be — Regent Street curving south toward Piccadilly, traffic that looks like film traffic at night, the kind of London window that London hotels charge you twelve hundred pounds to look out of.

The bathroom is Carrara marble, which is the kind of detail that sounds like a press release until you actually use one. Carrara holds heat differently. After a bath, the room stays warm for an hour. The towels are not the puffy nonsense most five-stars use; they are the flat, dense, Italian-mill kind that men under fifty actually prefer.

The bar — and why men should still go to bars

The Green Bar at Café Royal is the part of the hotel I trust most. It has been there in some form since 1865, when the original Café Royal opened as a French-leaning gathering room for London’s fast-living men. Oscar Wilde drank there. Winston Churchill drank there. Muhammad Ali had a press conference there. The current bar is not the original — that closed in 2008 — but the David Chipperfield restoration in 2012 was honest about what it was rebuilding.

But the reason to go to the Green Bar is not the cocktail. It is the room. There were eleven men in there on the Tuesday night I sat at the bar. Eight of them were drinking alone. None of them looked uncomfortable. That is harder to engineer than a hotel bar admits. Most hotel bars in London at this price tier feel like they are designed for couples, with the solo male traveller treated as overflow. The Green Bar is the opposite. It is built around the idea that a man might come in alone and stay an hour.

The Akasha spa

I want to say something about Akasha that the official literature won’t say. Akasha is the only proper spa floor in central London where the gym is genuinely a gym. Most London hotel spas treat the gym as a side dish — a small room with three machines, designed for the guest who wants to feel virtuous before breakfast. Akasha treats the gym as the spine of the spa, with the wet rooms and treatment rooms arranged around it.

This matters for the male reader. A man who travels weekly does not stop training because he is on the road. He cannot. He needs to be able to lift, properly, and then steam, and then sit, and then eat. Akasha is set up for exactly that sequence.

Why a man with taste actually books this hotel

The reason to book Café Royal — over Claridge’s, over the Connaught, over the Berkeley — is the location. It sits at the southern end of Regent Street, three minutes from the back door of Burberry on Heddon Street, eight minutes from Truefitt & Hill on St James’s, six minutes from Anderson & Sheppard on Old Burlington Street, two minutes from the Royal Academy. If you are in London for menswear, this is the hotel that puts you at the centre of the trip rather than the edge.

What you are paying for at Café Royal is the address combined with the receiving. You can find more theatrical hotels in London. You can find quieter ones. You can find cheaper ones. You cannot easily find a hotel of this size that has remembered, fourteen years into its second life, what a hotel is supposed to do for a man who walks through the door tired.

That, I think, is enough.