Rooms that stopped being restaurants and became institutions. Mr Chow, opened on 14 February 1968, is the clearest case of how that happens deliberately: Michael Chow put Beijing cooking in front of Italian waiters, removed the chopsticks and wrote a menu the British could read — in his words, like telling people the world was square. He was also the first restaurateur to hang important original art in a dining room, and Terence Conran credits him with the first designed restaurant in London.
The chapter’s other mechanism is discretion. Le Voltaire publishes neither a founding year nor an owner, and there is no printed menu — the address, the panelling and the certainty that nobody is looking are the entire product, and the register records the absence rather than inventing a date. Café Pushkin runs the opposite argument: a café invented in a French chanson in 1964, built in stone in 1999, and then made canonical.
Institutions also end. Le Cirque closed on 31 December 2017; Harry’s Bar passed out of Cipriani control in 2012 over a debt; the Ivy and Scott’s went to Abu Dhabi in April 2026.
The chapter also records what happens when a table becomes purely positional. In August 2023 the regional paper Var-Matin reported that Saint-Tropez restaurants were quoting a €5,000 minimum spend at the moment of booking — we have a table at €5,000, is that all right? — and screening callers against databases of what they had previously spent and tipped, telling those who scored badly that nothing was free until September. One diner was followed into a car park because a €500 tip was judged too small. The mayor called the practices despicable and more than a thousand stickers were distributed telling residents and visitors to report them to the town hall and the fraud service. ⚑ No individual house is named in the reporting, and the Library names none.
It is the same mechanism this Library has recorded three times over — Dяgilev pricing the box by status, Blue Marlin pricing the sand by the table, and the quai pricing the view of the yachts — arriving at the point where the room stops selling a meal and sells only a position. The port-facing terrace is a public room, open to all in theory and priced selectively in practice; 2023 is the year the practice stopped being tacit.
| Code | House | Contribution | Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| LHL-S-071 | Harry's Bar, Venice | LHL-S-124Harry's New York Bar, Paris | Verified |
| LHL-S-072 Maxim's de Paris | Maxim's de Paris | LHL-S-010Paris Society | Verified |
| LHL-S-073 La Tour d'Argent | La Tour d'Argent | Paris, 1582 by its own claim | Verified |
| LHL-S-074 Le Voltaire | Le Voltaire | 27 quai Voltaire, Paris | Review |
| LHL-S-075 Le Train Bleu | Le Train Bleu | Paris, 1901 | Verified |
| LHL-S-076 The Ivy | The Ivy | London, 1917 | Verified |
| LHL-S-077 Scott's | Scott's | London | Verified |
| LHL-S-078 Rules | Rules | London, 1798 | Verified |
| LHL-S-079 Le Cirque | Le Cirque | New York, 1974–2017 | Closed record |
| LHL-S-081 Da Vittorio | Da Vittorio | Brusaporto, from a 1966 Bergamo trattoria | Verified |
| LHL-S-107 Pavillon Ledoyen | Pavillon Ledoyen | Paris | Verified |
| LHL-S-112 Mr Chow | Mr Chow | Knightsbridge, 14 February 1968 | Verified |
| LHL-S-165 | Café Pushkin | Tverskoy Boulevard, Moscow, 4 June 1999, on the bicentenary of the poet’s birth — Andrei Dellos. The idea came to him as a Soviet-era guide-interpreter, when French visitors kept asking for a café that did not exist: Gilbert Bécaud had invented it in his 1964 song Nathalie, singing of chocolate chez Café Pouchkine. Dellos built the place the song described, and Bécaud sang Nathalie at the opening. Three rooms — the apothecary, the library, the mezzanine — in a purpose-built baroque house, the library holding editions from the 18th to the early 20th century. The menu of Russian noble cookery took four years with chef Andrei Makhov: two before opening, eighteen months after. First in the Forbes ranking of Moscow restaurants in 2020. A myth invented in a French song, built in stone, and made canonical | Verified |
| LHL-S-192 | Sénéquier | Quai Jean-Jaurès 29, 1887 — red awnings and red terrace chairs at the edge of the Vieux Port, a fixed point while the yachts, the fashions and the prices around it changed completely. Founded as a pâtisserie and still known for three ancestral recipes: the tarte tropézienne, white nougat and candied fruit. Bardot made it famous during the 1956 shoot of Et Dieu… créa la femme. The port-facing café is a public room, open to all in theory and priced selectively in practice — the Quai Jean-Jaurès terrace has always carried a premium over the same seats a street inland. Earned its standing by refusal rather than reinvention | Verified |
| LHL-S-193 | Le Girelier | Quai Jean-Jaurès 9 — more than fifty years on the water, Provençal fish and shellfish opposite the superyacht berths, service from noon to midnight. Bouillabaisse with noble fish, paella royale, whole fish à la plancha, Beluga and Golden Imperial caviar; kitchen under David Didelot and Laurent Simon. Berths are a few steps away, which is the entry’s point: the house is positioned for arrival by sea rather than by street ⚑ founding year requires two sources | Verified |
| LHL-S-195 | Ristorante Puny | Piazza Martiri dell’Olivetta, Portofino, 1980 — Luigi Miroli opened it and named it Puny, his mother’s name for him. Ligurian cooking on the piazzetta facing the harbour: pappardelle alla Portofino, curried rice with prawns and peas, whole fish baked in salt under bay leaves. Miroli died in 2017 and his son Andrea runs it with his wife Jessica. The house rule is a door policy, and it is the exact opposite of the practice this chapter records at 2023: every guest is treated the same, from celebrities to tourists — princes and chief executives handled with the same manner as anyone else, in a room chosen by that clientele precisely for discretion. Denzel Washington became a personal friend; King Abdullah of Jordan and Madonna among visitors. ⚑ Prices are high and the location is openly part of what is paid for — guides say so plainly, and so does the register | Verified |