How Mayfair got its mojo back

Swaggering new clubs with staggering A-listers, and ultra-luxe restaurants, are making New Mayfair’ the place to spend, reports Marie-Claire Chappet

- Marie-Claire Chappet

MAYFAIR has always been the best — it’s still what everyone wants on Monopoly, right?” says Tom Couch of The Arts Club. If there was any doubt that W1 is still London’s hautest postcode, consider the past few years: a surge of unprecedented investment, old institutions getting multi-million-pound facelifts, a flurry of new members’ clubs and a roster of new restaurants.

The past six months alone have seen the launch of several luxe eateries: Socca, Humo, Taku, Mount Street Restaurant and Koyn, as well as Mister Nice, cheerily named after Howard Marks, the drug runner. Tactless? Perhaps, but no one claimed Mayfair had taste. What it has is money, now pouring back in for a glitzy good time.

“You just need to embrace it for what it is,” says Michael Hennegan, ES Magazine’s society editor. “It’s never going to be where you go for an underground rave. If you leave your judgment at the door, you’ll enjoy it.”

“Is it a relaxed night out? Hardly. But it’s not meant to be,” says Couch. “That’s not what you come to Mayfair for. If you’ve bothered to dress up, of course you’re going to pose.”

Effortlessly cool, then, Mayfair is not. But if it offers cool on any level, it might be the fact that it isn’t trying to be cool. It is unashamedly the sum of its slightly-naff glittery parts, even if now things are beginning to change.

“This is the ‘New Mayfair’ everyone’s been talking about,” says one member of The Twenty Two, glancing around at the restaurant-cum-members’ club which opened on Grosvenor Square last year. “There’s no dress code, and there’s mischief in the air.”