The Best Places in East Mayfair

A doorman in a top hat meets you outside eleven joined Georgian townhouses in Mayfair, which sets the tone for this grand, old-school London hotel. Brown's has been around forever, and a top-to-bottom renovation by Olga Polizzi brought the interiors into something more cultured and contemporary than the usual country-house look. Shelves of British literature, the Donovan Bar, and Charlie's for pre-theatre dinners round things out. Forbes Five Star and Michelin 2 Keys.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Five Star
2. Michelin Guide 2 Keys
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The man who ran the American Bar at the Savoy for nearly eight years now runs this sleek Mayfair cocktail bar a short walk from Green Park. Erik Lorincz built Kwãnt around drinks that don't resemble anything else in London, layering fermented teas, misos, and awamori into compositions that feel genuinely considered rather than merely unusual. It ranks on the World's 50 Best Bars list. The room is calm and grown-up, which lets the cocktails do the talking.

1. The 50 #79 · The World's 50 Best Bars
2. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
3. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The coral reef ceiling by Damien Hirst sets the tone before you've ordered anything: this is Mayfair doing Asian-inspired food and cocktails with a straight face and a very large budget. The room is all bronzed mermaids and mirrored walls, and the crowd dresses accordingly. The bar program is serious despite the spectacle, and the kitchen sends out sushi and robata to tables full of people who booked weeks out.

1. The Pinnacle Guide 2 Pins
2. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · Rising Star · Top 50 Cocktail Bars · Jelena Bulatovskaja
3. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The Palm Court still runs five seatings of afternoon tea a day, and guests still dress for dinner, which tells you everything about the register of this hotel. Neoclassical Louis XVI interiors, a Green Park address, and a staff whose friendliness tends to catch first-timers off guard. A renovation is underway through 2028, but the Ritz has been making that trade-off look easy for a very long time. Michelin lists it at 2 Keys.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. Michelin Guide 2 Keys
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The lobby's Ming green marble arrives before you've even found your room, and the spiral staircase down to Akira Back's first UK restaurant makes clear this hotel takes its interiors seriously. A Michelin 2 Keys, Forbes Four Star property in Mayfair's Hanover Square, it holds fewer rooms than private residences, which keeps things quiet in the way only money reliably does. Vivienne Westwood designed the signature fan.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. Michelin Guide 2 Keys

A nine-metre steel bar anchors this tiny, dark speakeasy tucked beneath the Kricket restaurant group's original Soho site. The cocktail menu, called "In Search of the Divine," pulls from the Indian subcontinent, so your Old Fashioned comes with coconut and jaggery and your margarita gets chaat masala. It holds 23 people, runs until 3am, and operates mostly on walk-ins, which either sounds chaotic or ideal depending on your evening. Ranked in the Top 50 Cocktail Bars.

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
2. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #48 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars
3. The Infatuation The 22 Best Bars In London

Three Edwardian red-brick buildings a short walk from the palace, arranged around a courtyard that glows with neon after dark. This is an all-suites hotel, so the rooms run large by London standards, with a residential feel that tilts more contemporary apartment than imperial grandeur. The Indian influences are there but quiet. The Jaguar Suite was shaped by the automaker's design director, which tells you something about the clientele. Forbes Four Star.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A flower-filled pool and a buzzing bar greet you on the way up to this Mayfair Indian dining room, which holds a Michelin star and pulls a crowd split evenly between power lunches and date nights. The chef's cooking takes Indian tradition somewhere more restless and precise, with the sourcing doing a lot of the quiet work. Private rooms make it a favorite with the suits, but the room itself earns the evening on its own.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

Oscar Wilde drank here, which the hotel wears lightly but you'll notice. Hotel Café Royal is a Forbes Four Star property on Regent Street, with a gilded Georgian shell wrapped around modern guest rooms, see-and-be-seen restaurants, and lounges so ornate they border on theatrical. Piccadilly Circus, Mayfair, and Soho are all a short walk, making it one of the more strategically placed addresses in central London.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star

A tucked-away hotel on a quiet lane off Piccadilly, The Stafford London splits its rooms across a Victorian main house, a former royal stable yard, and a newer mews building with contemporary furnishings, so no two stays feel quite the same. The American Bar at the back is a tchotchke-lined room that takes its gin fizzes seriously. It holds a Forbes Four Star rating and the kind of hush that St James's does better than anywhere.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star

Living green walls run floor to ceiling throughout this Mayfair hotel, which makes the sustainability pitch hard to miss but also, against all odds, genuinely beautiful. Two renovated buildings near Green Park read as a single purpose-built retreat, with clean Scandinavian lines softened by organic textures and actual plants. The Bamford spa is a draw on its own. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A Michelin two-Key hotel that occupies an entire pedestrian side street in Soho, complete with a bowling alley, cinema, spa, restaurant, and a bronze sculpture in the courtyard. The rooms come dressed in Kit Kemp's signature collision of bold prints, antiques, and Crittall windows that somehow wrestle daylight out of a London sky. The theatre and film crowd are never far away, and the basement cinema is presumably part of the appeal.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Keys

Oscar Wilde used to drink at the bar here, which tells you something about the hotel's idea of itself. Hotel Café Royal is a grand luxury property on lower Regent Street, with Michelin's two Keys, interiors that span Regency grandeur to mid-century polish, and a spa that takes wellness seriously. The crowd skews more business mogul than bohemian poet these days, but the bones of the place make that easy to forgive.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Keys

The ground floor is a proper pub, rammed most hours with people working through what regulars insist is the finest pint of Guinness in London. Climb the stairs and The Devonshire becomes a grill room, where dry-aged beef butchered on site meets an open-fire kitchen. The team behind it includes a former Heston Blumenthal lieutenant, which explains the quiet technical seriousness underneath what looks, pleasantly, like a Soho pub having a very good time. Top 50 Gastropubs ranked it first in 2026.

1. World's 101 Best #45 · World's Best Steak Restaurants
2. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #1 · Top 50 Gastropubs
3. National Restaurant Awards 2026 · Gastropub of the Year · The National Restaurant Awards

The "Press for Champagne" button at every booth is not a gimmick so much as a philosophy. This reservation-only downstairs cocktail bar is all David Collins deco, monogrammed everything, and opulent blue-and-pink booths that somehow avoid being garish. Cocktails are the point here, served in surroundings that suggest a very glamorous train that never has to arrive anywhere.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A bronze sculpture of a man hauling the Palace of Westminster on his shoulder greets you in the lobby, which tells you everything about where you are. This Westminster hotel leans hard into its political past, and the wrought-iron stair railings suffragette Emily Wilding Davison once chained herself to are still in place downstairs. The 256 rooms read bigger than the number suggests, with natural light and a boutique calm that survives the refurb.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Recommended

A tucked-away St. James's hotel in a series of Georgian townhouses with its own private courtyard, the kind of address you either know or you don't. DUKES LONDON runs to 87 rooms and leans into old-school discretion: attentive staff, classic decor, afternoon tea in the Drawing Room, and a basement health club with marble steam room. The bar next door has made the martinis famous, which is a fine problem to have.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Recommended

Thirteen connected Georgian townhouses stitched into a single hotel, which means the classic atmosphere isn't manufactured. Flemings is Mayfair without the frost: posh but not aggressively exclusive, contemporary interiors that respect the architecture rather than fighting it. Rooms run from cozy singles up under the eaves to a seven-bedroom townhouse, with Hyde Park and Green Park a short walk in opposite directions. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key

Vintage vinyl lines the shelves and a pair of decks sits tucked behind the bar, which tells you something about how seriously this Mayfair cocktail bar takes atmosphere. It lives inside the restaurant Nijū but operates on its own quiet logic, the kind of place where the hospitality anticipates what you need before you say it. The drinks are inventive without being showy, and the room feels more like a living room than a scene.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery
2. Spirited Awards 2026 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best International Restaurant Bar – Europe
3. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

The rococo plasterwork spiraling through the lobby feels like a baroque fever dream squeezed inside a red-brick Westminster hotel. St. Ermin's has a covert past to match: Churchill's Special Operations Executive ran clandestine operations from one of the upper floors, MI6 set up here too, and a rumored tunnel still connects the building to the Palace of Westminster. The velvet Chesterfields and collection of teapots make it all feel very civilized, which was presumably the point.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Recommended

Art deco interior, deliberately low-lit, tucked into Kingly Court's covered yard off Carnaby Street. This is a cocktail bar that leans Italian aperitivo: the menu summarises itself as "luxurious libations and late-night liaisons," which is either perfectly on-brand or mildly incriminating depending on your evening. Drinks are elegant without being theatrical, garnishes kept in check. It ranked 45th on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list, which the room carries without making a fuss about it.

1. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #45 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

You reach it through a quiet cobbled mews off St James's Street, past a row of old stables, which is either romantic or mildly confusing depending on your navigation skills. The American Bar inside The Stafford Hotel is an old-school hotel bar draped in decades of accumulated Americana: baseball caps, club ties, and model planes hang from the ceiling alongside photos of guests ranging from Dolly Parton to Margaret Thatcher.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The basement lounge bar beneath Novikov's two restaurants has a supperclub atmosphere that feels engineered to make you order another round. It's a cocktail bar built for Mayfair money, the kind of room where the lighting flatters everyone equally and the spending tends to follow suit. A Moscow restaurateur's first London outpost, the whole building runs on theatre, and some of that energy makes it downstairs.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The Donovan Bar is the dim, clubby cocktail den tucked into a Mayfair hotel, where the menu runs from a normal £25 martini up to a vintage daiquiri that costs about as much as a used car. Nobody makes you order the car. The room is sultry and surprisingly unstuffy, a good setting for a punchy martini, some light public affection, and a quiet moment of financial reflection.

1. The Infatuation The 14 Best Hotel Bars In London, Ranked By Most Expensive Cocktail
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery
3. Spirited Awards 2026 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best International Hotel Bar – Europe

A crimson Victorian townhouse tucked into a cul-de-sac off St. James's Street, this boutique hotel is part of a German luxury group quietly doing a convincing impression of a nineteenth-century gentlemen's club. The sixty rooms are snug but deeply comfortable, and the real atmosphere pools in the small side-rooms and antechambers, where the conspiratorial hush feels less decorated and more inherited. The bar and a fine dining restaurant round things out.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A 201-seat private screening room and an in-house casino set the tone for a hotel that commits to the bit. The May Fair is a sleek, large-scale Mayfair property that's traded the old manor-house look for muted earth tones and a slightly minimalist feel without losing any of the square footage. The spa leans vaguely Asian, the bar packs in a hip West End crowd, and the rooms come loaded with every modern comfort money can arrange.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Fifteen Georgian townhouses stitched into one on Half Moon Street, which is about as Mayfair as Mayfair gets. This boutique hotel leans hard into its Oscar Wilde associations and a fox mascot that turns up everywhere, filling rooms with saturated colors, country-house warmth, and custom bath products. The Dandy Bar's idiosyncratic wine list and cocktail menu give guests a compelling reason not to wander far for a nightcap.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A members'-club-style hotel a short walk from Buckingham Palace, the Guardsman keeps its dining room and bar strictly for residents and their guests, so you'll never compete with a wedding party for your own table. The mottled-brick exterior is sober grey trimmed in gold, and inside, Art Deco slides into something warmer, with neutrals, gem tones, and heated bathroom floors even in the smallest rooms.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

The crudo bar at this sleek Mayfair spot is the reason to pull up a stool rather than a chair. It's an Italian bar with serious cocktail credentials, Difford's Guide, listed, set inside a room that manages to feel both polished and relaxed. The terrace catches good light. Order something cold, eat something raw, and let the elegant surroundings do what elegant surroundings in Mayfair always do: make you feel you've made excellent decisions.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
2. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

A vintage London Underground carriage parked in the middle of a Soho cocktail bar sets the tone early. Cahoots leans hard into its 1940s Blitz-era conceit, with a speakeasy vibe, live music, and vintage DJs to keep the period piece from feeling static. The cocktail list matches the theme, all rum and bourbon combinations with theatrical names. You'll need to book ahead for entry, which, at a bar built around a secret, feels about right.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The Pinnacle Guide 2 Pins
2. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

There's no sign outside, just a bell to push and a lobby that makes you feel like you're about to do something mildly illicit. Milk and Honey is a members-style cocktail bar on Poland Street with a downtown New York pedigree, the sibling of Sasha Petraske's Manhattan original that helped reshape what a serious bar could be. The hush inside is very much the point.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin

Glass demijohns of infused pisco line the bar at this subterranean Peruvian cocktail bar tucked beneath Coya on Piccadilly. The basement does a convincing job of making Mayfair disappear: carved woodwork and ornate South American details swallow the room whole. The crowd leans well-dressed, which tracks for the postcode. Pisco anchors the menu, flanked by tequila and mezcal for anyone who needs convincing.

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
2. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Dukes Bar is a small, old-school martini room tucked inside a St. James's hotel, where Ian Fleming drank and "shaken, not stirred" is said to have been born. The glasses and spirits live in the freezer, and the drinks are mixed at your table with enough ceremony to make you forget the carpet. Expect strong pours, a hushed room, and cocktail prices that suit the postcode.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The Infatuation The 14 Best Hotel Bars In London, Ranked By Most Expensive Cocktail
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The Rivoli is the cocktail lounge off the Ritz lobby, where gold is less a colour than a house rule, right down to the leaf floating in the fizzing Ritz 110. Velvet leopard-print chairs add some mischief to the glamour. Expect a hotel-bar price tag and the sort of people-watching that makes you wish a Bravo camera crew were seated nearby, mid-Gibson, discussing a settlement. Champagne cocktails are the obvious move, given the address.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The Infatuation The 14 Best Hotel Bars In London, Ranked By Most Expensive Cocktail

The copper-topped bar and wood-panelled walls give this Soho cocktail bar the feel of someone's very well-stocked living room, which suits the mood upstairs from Jason Atherton's Social Eating House. The drinks are serious, and the bar snacks, pork sliders and duck rillettes among them, are the kind of thing that makes leaving harder than it should be. "Dill or No Dill" remains on the menu, which tells you enough about the room's personality.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The Georgian bay window at the front does a lot of the work here, pulling Mayfair's more well-heeled regulars in off Charles Street to lean against it with a pint. This is a proper pub, if a rather polished one, with crisp white linen in the dining room at the back and private floors above for when you need to be discreet about something. The footman of the name is long gone, but the postcode still sets the dress code.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Dark leather armchairs and pine-toned wood give this cocktail bar the feel of a library where someone eventually brings you a drink. It sits inside Jason Atherton's Mayfair flagship, though the Social Room earns its own orbit, unhurried and a little more stylish than the average hotel bar shortcut off Oxford Street. Settle into a couch along the wall and let the bar team do the rest.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The 1937 Cafe Royal Cocktail Book was written here, which tells you something about the building's relationship with a good drink. The bar itself, tucked off Air Street behind a discreet Art Deco sign, is darker and more industrial than the grand hotel around it would suggest. Dark green glass bricks line the walls, and an island bar anchors the room. A cocktail bar, in other words, that takes its history seriously without making you sit through a lecture about it.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Two floors of Polynesian-themed basement beneath Mayfair, where the "Lanai Lounge" comes lined with black bamboo and lauhala mats, and the "Aloha Party Room" below that pairs orange banquettes with 1970s lampshades. This is a tiki bar, not a quiet drinks spot, and the crowd arriving in evening wear to dance to funky tunes seems entirely unbothered by the contradiction. Come dressed for a party, because the room certainly has.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A neon Tracey Emin original reading "Keep me safe" guides you through the Royal Academy's courtyard and into a lift that opens straight into this cocktail bar, tucked in the old Keeper's House wing. The room is small and the setup is serious, with botanically driven drinks and service that manages to feel genuinely warm without trying too hard. An easy place to lose an evening, or an afternoon, for that matter.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Tucked in the basement beneath a Mexican restaurant on Brewer Street, this compact cocktail bar organizes its drinks menu around tequila and rum, divided into Batidas, Margaritas, Daiquiris, and the catchall "Gringos." Dick Bradsell, who invented the Bramble and the Vodka Espresso, has been known to hold court here, which is the kind of detail that makes a basement bar feel like a discovery rather than an oversight.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Dark wood walls, dim lighting, and soft leather chairs sit below street level near Piccadilly Circus, giving this classic cocktail bar the feel of somewhere that has always existed, deep underground, waiting for you specifically. The room strikes a balance between sophisticated and slightly conspiratorial, the kind of place where you order a second drink before finishing your first and nobody thinks less of you for it.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The cocktail bar attached to the Mayfair lobster-and-burger institution, with a list put together by the Soulshakers consultancy, who know their way around a shaker. The room insists you're here to eat, so arriving with plausible hunger and a quiet intention to just drink is the practical approach. The drinks themselves are the draw, familiar classics done with care, and the bar stools fill up fast with people who've made the same calculation.

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Perrier-Jouët's Belle Epoque anemones climb every surface of this lower-ground-floor champagne bar inside the grand St James's hotel, giving it the look of a drawing room that took a wrong turn somewhere floral. The fizz is the focus, poured in a room that leans heavily into the brand's art nouveau palette. Dukes is famous for its Martinis next door, so the champagne lounge feels like a deliberate counterpoint, softer and more decorative, but no less serious about what's in the glass.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

A sleek, almost spaceship-adjacent cocktail bar on the ground floor of the Nobu restaurant in Mayfair. Part of the operation draws its crowd from diners waiting on a table upstairs, but plenty come straight here with no dining ambitions at all. The room is sharp and minimal, the drinks leaning Japanese, and the general atmosphere suggests everyone is dressed a little better than they needed to be. Which, in Mayfair, is saying something.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The cocktail bar tucked beneath Sake No Hana is easy to miss: you push through two Japanese curtains that only reach your waist, which does make an entrance. It sits in the basement of the old Economist building in St James's, a listed piece of sixties architecture that drinks people still mourn as the former home of Che. Small, composed, and Japanese in spirit, it draws a pre-dinner crowd that the menu occasionally persuades to stay put.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

A rooftop cocktail bar at the May Fair Hotel where the menu opens with four pages of cigars before getting around to drinks. Glittering drapes and awnings do the work of making you forget the surrounding buildings entirely, and the high-end furnishings split the difference between indoors and out. The kind of place where ordering a Cohiba alongside your Negroni feels less like an affectation and more like the obvious move.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide