A hospital, then a hotel, then a library
The hotel occupies the great pale building on the corner where Belgravia meets Knightsbridge, looking across the traffic of Hyde Park Corner towards Apsley House and the Wellington Arch. It was designed by William Wilkins in the 1820s as St George's Hospital, a Greek Revival front of considerable dignity, and it served as a hospital until 1980, when St George's moved south to Tooting. The building became a hotel in 1991 and reopened after a long restoration in 2015.
It is a curious history for a hotel, and it shows in the proportions. The rooms on the principal floors are tall and formal, the corridors run long and straight, and the whole house has the gravity of a public building that happens to have been furnished in the Regency manner. The Library Bar sits at the heart of it, and it is the room in the building I recommend most often.
The room itself
It is a panelled room lined with books, low lit and furnished for sitting rather than standing, with the bar set to one side so that the room reads first as a library and only second as a place to drink. The chairs are deep, the tables are small and well spaced, and the noise of Hyde Park Corner, which is one of the busiest junctions in London, does not reach it at all. People lower their voices on the way in without being asked to.
That hush is the point of the place. It is not a bar for being seen in, and it has none of the theatre of the famous cocktail rooms of Mayfair. What it offers instead is the rare pleasure of a room where two people can talk quietly for an hour with a single glass each, and where the person pouring that glass knows a great deal about what is in it.
A list that reaches back two centuries
The bar is known above all for its spirits, and for cognac in particular. Its collection is among the deepest in London, running from young and lively bottles to very old ones, and it has long included cognacs distilled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of them from before the phylloxera blight that ruined the vineyards of the Charente in the later nineteenth century. Spirit from those years is rare because so little was made afterwards and because every year in the cask costs a little of what is inside it. The shelves carry fine whiskies as well, but it is the cognac that people come for.
Cognac itself is a brandy made from grapes grown in a defined region around the town of Cognac, distilled twice and aged in oak. Most of what is drunk is a blend of many ages, marked VS, VSOP or XO according to the youngest spirit in it. A single vintage, the product of one year, is much rarer, and a very old one is closer to a historical document than to an ordinary drink.
How the old vintages are priced, without a figure
The oldest bottles are poured by the measure, and a measure from the top of the list is priced for its rarity rather than for its taste, much as a lot in a sale room is priced for its scarcity and its story. I will not print figures here: they change, and they would be meaningless without the bottle in front of you. It is enough to know that the list runs from the entirely reasonable to the extraordinary, and that the extraordinary end is meant for people who have come specifically for it.
For everyone else, the sensible course is to ask for the list and then ask the bartender. Tell him what you usually drink, say whether you want something to compare or something to remember, and let him suggest a glass or a pair of smaller measures from different decades. The better bars of London take real pleasure in being asked properly, and none of them think less of a guest who wants advice rather than the most expensive line on the page.
Why it belongs to the end of the evening
Cognac is a drink for after dinner, and the room keeps the same hours in spirit. At seven o'clock it is simply a handsome bar; at eleven, after a long dinner, it becomes the right place in London for the last glass of the night. Hyde Park Corner makes it an easy one to reach, since it sits at the hinge of Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Park Lane, and a dinner in any of the four is a short walk or a very short cab away. A dinner of Dover sole in Mayfair, as described in another letter, leads into it particularly well.
This is the shape that the later hours is written for: three hours at £700 for an evening that is mostly out of doors and between rooms, or four at £900 when a table sits in the middle. The last hour at the Library Bar is followed, as often as not, by the walk down into the Belgravia squares, which at midnight are about as quiet as anywhere in central London. Every length is set out on the tariff, and the fee is given to your companion in person as she arrives, before the evening has properly begun.
Company for the last hour
A bar like this rewards a companion who enjoys a drink as a subject in its own right, and several of the curvaceous women of the circle are exactly that. Luna takes the bar seats without being asked, drinks slowly, and will tell you what the bartender did differently this time. Milena has a stillness that settles a room and a taste for evenings that run late, which is precisely when this one is at its best.
Bianka lives in Knightsbridge, a short walk from the door, and has a memory for detail that makes her the ideal person to taste two cognacs beside; she will remember which one you preferred long after you have forgotten. Any of them can be arranged in the Salon, and I will tell you honestly which of the three is free on the night you want.
One line of the presentations carries most of the names above, and that line is curvaceous.
Alongside it
Tonight
Put it to use
What this letter describes takes one written line to set in motion, and Booking shows how little there is to it.