Room with a few
Private rooms for the party season in London
WORDS | ROBINA DAM
TRYING TO HIRE A PRIVATE EVENT SPACE in a London restaurant would, you’d have thought, be a piece of (polenta) cake. But when it comes to the lead up to the festive season and rooms are being fought over by companies – small and large – for Christmas parties, it’s more of a challenge to find an interesting space, space to manoeuvre and good food and drink.
Our recommendations? First off, the enormous La Porte des Indes restaurant is tucked away behind Marble Arch on a silent side street – but worth hunting out, especially for its Jungle Bar (pictured above). It’s unusual in many ways: the restaurant specialises in the cuisine of the French empire in India (around Pondicherry in the south) so the Creole influence marks it out from the sub-continental food usually found in Britain.
The 400-seater is pretty awesome with its huge marble staircase and the pièce de résistance, a nine-foot waterfall. But its basement Jungle Bar can be separately booked for around 50 people for a drinks and canapés party.
With its rattan furniture and last days of the Raj décor, it exudes enough atmosphere for you to yearn for gin slings and monsoon rains but manages to stop short of being a parody of Carry On… Up the Khyber. And the peanut shells tossed on the floor are meant to evoke the chilled-out vibe of the famous bar in Singapore’s Raffles Hotel in the 1940s.
Cocktails (£8.90-£10) are more sophisticated than their exotic appearances would have you believe, and are given spicy twists such as the tamarind margarita or Long Island Spiced Tea with cinnamon. Canapés include the more familiar chicken tikka or salmon tandoori morsels (pictured previous page), paneer (a type of cottage cheese) bites and samosas.
For a more English country house vibe in the centre of Soho, there’s a more varied choice of room sizes (for either drinks parties or sit-down suppers) at Kettner’s, which carried out a £3 million refurb last year. They’ve an excellent website, rooms that evoke Lillie Langtry drinking out of champagne coupes and one of the best ladies’ powder rooms (with a well-lit mirror above the sinks, and a full length one by the doorway) so it’s a pity the private events team can be rather slapdash with responding to enquiries. Be warned that you’ll need to be persistent. If there are only a dozen of you, you’re better off just booking a ‘nook’ that seats 12 in the ground floor champagne bar where the house champagne Gallimard is £8.75 a glass, £44 a bottle.
But for the ultimate in privacy, check out the Krug Room at The Dorchester which just reopened last month. And when the word ‘exclusive’ is bandied about so loosely these days – in everything from the love life revelations of a girl band to a new type of hairbrush – it’s hard to convey just how unique it is.
This is the pinnacle of chef’s tables – its glass wall overlooking the kitchens exudes understated luxury; the walls and floor are of solid walnut offset by the glass and steel of the central table. With vintage Krug and special menus available, this is clearly a case of price on application. The room seats 12; how’s that for the last supper?
La Porte des Indes, 32 Bryanston Street, W1 +44 (0)20 7224 0055; www.laportedesindes.com
Kettners, 29 Romilly Street, W1 +44 (0)20 7734 6112; www.kettners.com
The Dorchester, 53 Park Lane, W1; +44 (0)20 7629 8888; www.thedorchester.com
