Hotel Café Royal

Where Regent Street's History Meets a Modern Hotel Ambition

The southern end of Regent Street has long carried a particular weight in London's social geography. John Nash's Georgian curve was designed as processional architecture, not merely as a street, and the buildings that line it have historically attracted institutions trying to match that scale of ambition. Hotel Café Royal, at 10 Air Street, sits at precisely that junction between civic grandeur and private excess. The Georgian façade is unchanged; what happens inside has been remade entirely for a category of traveller who wants history as a backdrop, not a constraint.

For well over a century before becoming a hotel, Café Royal was the kind of bar and restaurant that cities produce once a generation: a place where Oscar Wilde argued, where theatre's brightest lights congregated, and where statesmen and journalists occupied the same room without anyone finding it remarkable. The building's conversion into one of London's most ambitious luxury hotels didn't erase that layered identity so much as reorganise it around 160 rooms and a suite of dining, bar, and wellness spaces that few comparable properties in the city attempt under one roof. La Liste placed it at 97.5 points in 2026, a score that aligns it with the upper register of London grand-address hotels rather than the boutique-design segment.

The Rooms: Carrera Marble and Deliberate Restraint

London's luxury hotel market has split in recent years between maximalist statement properties and those that deploy restraint as its own kind of statement. Hotel Café Royal belongs to the latter, though with one conspicuous exception: the bathrooms. The guest rooms themselves are dressed almost entirely in pale greys and nudes, with plaster walls carved to mimic the Portland stone of the exterior facade, a quiet architectural joke that connects the interior to the building's original street presence. Candy-coloured chairs and golden lampshades appear occasionally, less as decoration than as deliberate interruptions in an otherwise measured palette.

The bathrooms are where the hotel makes its most overt commitment. Every en-suite surface is solid Carrera marble, rusticated to match the bedroom walls, and the bathtubs are cut from a single piece of stone. The engineering required to achieve this is not incidental: the hotel reinforced every floor to support the marble's weight, a detail that tells you something about the degree of finish being chased here. At a starting rate of around $1,105, the 160-room property prices against peers like Claridge's, The Connaught, and Raffles London at The OWO rather than the mid-tier grand hotels.

Dining: A French Foundation, an elBulli Outlier

Modern French tasting menus have become the default format for London's most technically serious dining rooms, and the version at Alex Dilling at Hotel Café Royal positions itself firmly in that tradition. The London-born chef's meticulous approach to the format occupies an intimate room within the hotel, the kind of counter-to-kitchen proximity that allows the kitchen's precision to register in the dining room. It is the sort of dining that rewards repeat visits more than single occasions, where the logic of the menu becomes clearer with familiarity.

The more unexpected offering is Cakes and Bubbles, where Albert Adrià, formerly a key figure at elBulli in Barcelona, applies Catalan avant-garde technique to a dessert-led format. The cheesecake built from Baron Bigod cheese, hazelnut, and white chocolate represents precisely the kind of intersection the editorial angle of this property rewards: a globally trained technique applied to ingredients with strong regional identities (Baron Bigod being one of Britain's most closely watched raw-milk cheeses, produced in Suffolk). Paired with Veuve Clicquot, it operates in a register that few properties in London attempt with this level of seriousness. For the broader dining picture in London, our full London restaurants guide maps the city's current range.

The Grill Room and the Green Bar: Two Rooms, Two Centuries

The Grill Room is one of the more theatrically decorated spaces in London's hotel dining circuit. Gold leaf, Louis XVI detailing, and ceiling-high mirrors create the kind of room where the architecture competes with the food for attention, and the afternoon tea format is well-suited to that arrangement: it slows the meal enough that the ceiling ornament gets its due. London afternoon tea has become a competitive sub-category in its own right, with properties from The Savoy to NoMad London treating it as a signature format. The Grill Room earns its place in that conversation through setting alone.

Green Bar takes a different approach entirely. It draws its identity from the Café Royal Cocktail Book, compiled in 1937, a period when the building's clientele included the kind of hard-drinking intellectuals who made absinthe their working drink. An ever-flowing absinthe fountain is the room's centrepiece, less as a novelty gesture than as a historical reference: David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and the Beatles have all spent time in the rooms that surround it. The bar sits off the restaurant and has its own street entrance, which gives it an operational logic separate from the hotel's dining program and positions it as a destination in its own right within the city's cocktail circuit. For the full picture, our London bars guide covers the current scene.

Akasha: London's Wellness Infrastructure

Urban wellness facilities at London's upper-tier hotels have become an increasingly serious differentiator. The Akasha spa at Hotel Café Royal sits in the basement and operates at a scale that most comparable city properties do not match: a lap pool approaching 60 feet in length, a cutting-edge gym, a lounge bar, multiple treatment rooms, a Vichy shower, a private hammam, and a private watsu pool. That last facility is the only one of its kind in London, offering hydrotherapy treatments in a format borrowed from Japanese aquatic therapy traditions. In a city where spa programming often functions as an afterthought to room and dining revenue, Akasha represents a genuine investment in the wellness side of the proposition. Properties like The Emory and 1 Hotel Mayfair have made wellness central to their identity in different ways; Akasha's argument is one of depth and specificity.

Planning a Stay

Hotel Café Royal is at 10 Air Street, W1B 5AB, on the southern end of Regent Street, within easy walking distance of Piccadilly Circus and the broader West End. The 160-room property sits at a starting point of around $1,105 per night, positioning it in the upper tier of London luxury alongside peers such as 11 Cadogan Gardens and The Emory. Those considering a broader UK trip might compare notes with Gleneagles in Auchterarder, Lime Wood in Lyndhurst, or The Newt in Bruton for contrasting countryside registers. For international comparisons in the grand-address category, Aman New York and Aman Venice operate in an overlapping peer set. Dining reservations at Alex Dilling and Cakes and Bubbles are separate from the room booking and should be secured in advance. Our full London hotels guide and London experiences guide offer further orientation for building out a stay.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the signature room at Hotel Café Royal?

The Grill Room is the most architecturally distinctive space in the hotel, with gold leaf detailing, Louis XVI ornamentation, and ceiling-high mirrors that reflect the room's ornate plasterwork. It holds the afternoon tea program and has been a reference point in the building's social history for over a century. La Liste's 97.5-point score in 2026 and a starting rate of around $1,105 per night place the hotel in the upper tier of London's grand-address properties, and the Grill Room is the space that leading communicates what that tier looks like physically.

What is the defining thing about Hotel Café Royal?

The combination of a genuinely documented social history, a multi-concept dining program that spans modern French tasting menus and an elBulli-connected dessert bar, and one of the city's more serious hotel spa facilities makes it one of the few properties in London operating across all three registers simultaneously. That breadth, in a city as competitive as London, at a price point confirmed by La Liste's 2026 recognition, is the clearest argument for choosing it over peers like Claridge's or Raffles London at The OWO.