104 Pall Mall
www.reformclub.com

The Reform Club on London’s Pall Mall is a fragment of petrified, collegiate radicalism: a place founded by establishment thinkers with progressive ideas, then carefully preserved in aspic for 170 years. Created by the Radicals and Whigs who’d pushed the Great Reform Bill through Parliament in 1832, the club – built next to its great conservative rival, the Carlton Club – became the heart of the emerging Liberal Party, forming a social hub for wealthy and well-connected 19th century progressives.

Thus, the Reform Club’s soaring central atrium, its billiard and card rooms, its restaurant, its private chambers – all beautifully designed in the style of an Italian palazzo by architect Charles Barry, the creator of today’s Houses of Parliament – were built to keep aristocrats and industrialists in the style to which they were accustomed while they plotted the advancement of liberal ideas.

Since those days, liberal ideas have moved on; the Reform Club, though, has stuck determinedly to the standards of Victorian days. So visitors – assuming, that is, that they’re wearing a suit and tie – are greeted by staff who recognise by sight every one of the club’s 2,700 members, before entering a world of leather armchairs, discreet conversations, fine dining and G&Ts. This is a place where mobile phones and business papers are outlawed; a place with its own shoe-shining room; a place where members must sign for meals at the counter, lest their guests’ eyes be sullied by the sight of a financial transaction.

Opening the menu, I found the perfect starter for such a haven of genteel comforts: a green gazpacho soup, served – in a stroke of pure inspiration – with a frozen bloody Mary. The soup was light and refreshing, and quite outclassed by the sweet, punchy glass of beefed-up tomato juice; my companion praised his Scotch egg, but it was no competition.

Vegetarians are, I imagine, a fairly rare breed in the Reform Club – but nonetheless the chef had made an effort, producing a vegetable moussaka with fresh ingredients, excellent consistency and a pleasant garlic kick. And come the desserts, another convivial throwback to gentler times: a trundling sweet trolley, laden with delights. I chose the pecan nut pie, and was not disappointed.

As my choices suggest, the Reform Club’s ‘coffee room’ – as they call its restaurant – serves what is, in essence, very high-quality comfort food. Happily oblivious to the 21st century’s whirl of fusion cooking, haute cuisine, superfoods and other such fads, it gives its members what they want: a traditional service run within scrupulously-observed rules, in which discretion and manners will forever triumph over fashions and freedoms.

A very pleasant place to eat, then – and probably the most misnamed place in London. For while in 1981 the Reform Club showed a flash of its former radicalism by admitting women as members, it has otherwise remained single-mindedly, determinedly unreformed since the day it was founded. There are many fields in which that would not be a good thing – but in this case, it preserves the ethos of a club that serves a frozen bloody Mary with its soup starter. I never heard a better argument for traditions.