Mayfair doesn’t try very hard to be liked. It doesn’t need to. Named for a raucous two-week fair that ran here between 1686 and 1764 before the aristocracy decided it was lowering the tone, the neighbourhood has spent the intervening centuries becoming the most quietly confident square mile in London. This is where you’ll find Bond Street’s window displays, the Royal Academy, the world’s oldest hat shop (Lock & Co., making bowlers since 1676), and more five-star hotels than any other patch of the city.
It’s also a neighbourhood with at least one hidden gem. Duck off Piccadilly into Shepherd Market — once the site of the original May Fair and, at various points in its history, a red-light district — and you’ll some quirky independent restaurants and a pub or two that hasn’t changed its personality in decades.
I’ve spent time in all five of Mayfair’s grand dames on this list, wandering their lobbies, drinking in their bars, and eating in their restaurants, even if I haven’t laid my head on their pillows. Here’s how they compare.
Claridge’s
If there’s a single hotel that visitors picture when they imagine old London glamour, it’s this one. Walk through the revolving doors on Brook Street and you’re back in 1929 — the Art Deco lobby, the black and white checkerboard floor, the doormen in top hats who look like they were cast rather than hired. Claridge’s has been setting the standard for London luxury since 1856.
What’s changed since the archives were last updated is the dining. The old Claridge’s restaurant and, before that, Fera, have both given way to The Foyer & Reading Room, now under executive chef Martyn Nail, serving a seasonal, contemporary British menu across the same jade-and-white striped room where the hotel’s famous afternoon tea is poured.
That tea remains one of the great Mayfair rituals — more than 40 varieties curated with the Rare Tea Company’s Henrietta Lovell, tea sommeliers who twice-infuse each pot at precisely the right temperature, and a menu of sandwiches and pâtisserie that changes with the seasons rather than sitting on autopilot. Book ahead; it fills months out.
For a nightcap, the 1930s-styled Fumoir remains one of the most atmospheric small bars in London, and the newer Claridge’s Bar next door draws a slightly livelier after-work Mayfair crowd. If you want a local touch, ask about L’Epicerie, the hotel’s bakery tucked on Brook’s Mews behind the main building.
What I love most about Claridge’s, though, has nothing to do with the food. It’s the wartime story the concierges still tell: during the Second World War, several exiled European monarchs were living in London, and when people rang the hotel switchboard asking to be put through to “the King,” the operator would simply reply, “Which one?” That’s Claridge’s in a sentence — grand enough to have hosted half of Europe’s royalty at once, and self-assured enough to make a joke of it.
For a 50-plus traveller who wants the full, theatrical Mayfair experience without an ounce of stuffiness, this is the benchmark.
The Connaught
Where Claridge’s performs, The Connaught understates. Tucked into the genuinely villagey pocket of Mayfair around Mount Street — antique dealers, art galleries, and Aman-branded calm all within a hundred metres of each other — this is the hotel London insiders quietly prefer.
The headline news is gastronomic: Hélène Darroze at The Connaught now holds three Michelin stars, one of a tiny handful of restaurants in the country to do so, and it’s one of the best rooms to eat in London. Darroze’s food draws on her southwest French roots but spreads more broadly — expect dishes like Isle of Mull lobster with tandoori spice — and the signature dessert, a baba served with a choice of Armagnacs supplied by her brother Marc, is worth the visit alone. If three-Michelin-star pricing isn’t the mood, Jean-Georges at The Connaught offers a more relaxed, still deeply accomplished alternative, and the Connaught Grill is the one to know about for a proper British lunch.
Wine lovers should ask about the Sommelier’s Table, hidden in the limestone cellar below the kitchens, where a sommelier builds a wine flight around your stated tastes and the kitchen builds a bespoke menu to match. The Connaught Bar has been named the World’s Best Bar more than once, and its martini trolley is worth the detour even if you’re not staying. Below ground, the Aman Spa remains the only Aman-branded spa in the world outside an Aman resort of its own — a glassy black granite pool and a serene wellness floor that feels a world away from Mount Street above.
The Stafford
Tucked away in a cobbled courtyard just off St James’s — technically the very edge of Mayfair’s orbit, and worth the short walk regardless — The Stafford remains my personal favourite hotel in London, and the one I’d send a history-minded reader to first.
The hotel occupies three linked buildings: the 17th-century Main House, the Mews Suites, and the wonderful Carriage House, converted stable rooms that once housed the horses of Mayfair’s grandest addresses. Beneath it all sits a genuinely astonishing 380-year-old wine cellar that doubled as an air-raid shelter in the Second World War — there’s a small museum down there, and it’s one of the best fifteen minutes you can spend in a London hotel that doesn’t involve eating or drinking.
The Game Bird, the well-regarded British-produce-led dining room that operated here for the best part of a decade, closed in 2025 and reopened in September of that year as Michael Caines at The Stafford, with Michael Caines MBE installed as culinary strategist. The new menu leans into modern European cooking with a strong British-Isles sourcing ethos, though it keeps a few Stafford institutions on the card, including the beef Wellington and Brixham Dover sole. It’s a genuinely interesting change of direction and worth booking ahead of a stay, even a fleeting one.
The American Bar, thankfully, is untouched — still lined with ties, baseball caps, and decades of memorabilia donated by guests, still one of the best places in London for a proper cocktail and some eavesdropping. Ask for a table in the courtyard on a mild evening; it’s one of Mayfair’s best-kept outdoor secrets.
The Beaumont
For readers who want five-star comfort with an art-world sensibility rather than a royal one, The Beaumont is the pick. Independently owned and unmistakably Art Deco, it sits just off Brown Hart Gardens with the aesthetic of a smart 1920s ocean liner — all warm wood panelling, low lighting, and a lobby that genuinely feels like a Poirot set.
The Beaumont’s great party trick remains ROOM, a habitable Antony Gormley sculpture that functions as an actual guest suite — a striking piece of hotel-as-gallery thinking. There’s a Magritte hanging in the bar that gives Le Magritte Bar its name, and enough art scattered through the corridors that a slow wander feels like a small private gallery visit.
On the food side, the Colony Grill Room remains the main event, serving classic grill dishes from both sides of the Atlantic in a room styled after the grand New York and London grill rooms of the last century. The Gatsby Room does an atmospheric afternoon tea with live piano, and the hotel’s spa — hammam, ice room, and all — remains one of the better-kept wellness secrets in Mayfair.
This is the Mayfair five-star for a reader who has done the big names before and wants somewhere with a more personal, art-collector feel.
London Hilton on Park Lane
I’ll be honest: this one used to be a hard hotel to recommend. But a multi-million-pound renovation, completed in stages to mark the hotel’s sixtieth anniversary as the first Hilton to open in Britain, has genuinely changed the story here.
The old, dated lobby is gone, replaced with an open, gold-toned space anchored by a striking installation of 2,000 suspended aluminium leaves by London designer Giles Miller. Rooms and suites have been refurbished floor by floor — ask for one of the newly finished rooms on a high floor facing Hyde Park, since the rolling programme means quality can still vary by floor. The old rooftop restaurant, Galvin at Windows, closed in 2024; its 28th-floor space is now home to Shanghai Me, a Pan-Asian restaurant, and the ground floor now houses the Park Corner Brasserie and Revery Bar.
What hasn’t changed is the location, which was always the point of staying here in the first place: uninterrupted Hyde Park views, a five-minute walk from Green Park, and Shepherd Market close enough for an evening drink somewhere with more character. It’s the least intimate hotel on this list, and still feels more corporate-luxury than personal-luxury even after the refurbishment — but for a reader who wants a genuinely five-star Mayfair base with those views and doesn’t need the history or theatre of the others, it’s a legitimate contender.
Things to Do in Mayfair
Fortnum and Mason is the neighbourhood’s great institution — still trading from the same Piccadilly address it opened at in 1707, still the best place in London to buy a jar of marmalade or a tin of biscuits as a gift. The food hall alone is worth an hour, and its own afternoon tea, served in the Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon, is a London classic.
The Royal Academy of Arts, founded in 1768 and still run by working artists, is one of the more overlooked major galleries in London — less crowded than the big national museums, with a changing programme of exhibitions and a lovely courtyard to sit in when the sun’s out.
For the world’s oldest hat shop, head to Lock and Co on St James’s Street, which has been making hats since 1676 and can still measure your head with a conformateur and make you something to fit it. A short walk from there, Jermyn Street remains the address for a proper bespoke shirt or suit if you’ve got the time for a fitting.
Bookish types should set aside an afternoon for Mayfair’s two great bookshops: Waterstones Piccadilly, five vast floors with three cafes tucked among the shelves, and Hatchards, the oldest bookshop in the country and official bookseller to the Royal Household, a few doors down.
Shepherd’s Market is the part of Mayfair that still feels like a village rather than a postcode — a tangle of small streets built on the site of the original May Fair, which drifted from fashionable to disreputable and back again over three centuries. It’s worth a slow stroll regardless of whether you’re eating or drinking there.
And if you need your hair done while you’re in town, Four London on Duke Street has quietly been a favourite of London’s style set and me for well over a decade.
Restaurants in Mayfair
The Wolseley remains the grand dame of Mayfair dining rooms — an all-day European brasserie set in a extraordinary 1921 building that started life as a car showroom for Wolseley Motors and then spent decades as a Barclays branch before Chris Corbin and Jeremy King turned it into a restaurant in 2003. The vaulted ceilings and black-and-white marble floor make breakfast here feel like an occasion, and it’s still one of the best rooms in London for people-watching over a late breakfast or a proper afternoon tea.
Murano, Angela Hartnett’s Michelin-starred dining room on Queen Street, continues to do some of the best modern Italian food in London, built on her Italian heritage and years spent under Gordon Ramsay at The Connaught before striking out on her own. The pasta, made fresh at least twice daily, is the reason to book, and the lunch menu remains excellent value for a Michelin-starred kitchen of this calibre.
Hide, the Ollie Dabbous and Hedonism Wines collaboration overlooking Green Park, is worth visiting for the wine list alone — one of the largest and most interesting in the city, drawing on the extraordinary Hedonism cellar just up the road on Davies Street.
Pubs in Mayfair
The Punchbowl, tucked into a Mayfair mews and once part-owned by Guy Ritchie, is now run by the independent Butcombe Brewing Company — a shift that seems to have done it good, since it picked up Muddy Stilettos’ Destination Pub of the Year for 2025. It’s still the sort of low-beamed, wood-panelled pub you want to find down a Mayfair backstreet, with Judy’s restaurant upstairs and a good breakfast menu.
The Audley Public House, on the corner of Mount Street and South Audley Street, runs across five floors, with a ground-floor pub, the gallery-like Mount Street Restaurant above, and a set of private event spaces above that.
The Guinea, on a quiet Bruton Place mews, has been serving beer on this exact spot since 1423 and has been serving its famous steaks since 1952. It had a refresh in 2024, which has smartened up the grill room without touching the traditional pub at the front, so you can still get a pint and a pie downstairs or book the more formal dining room for a proper steak.
How to Choose Between Them
If you want the full Mayfair fantasy — history, theatre, and an afternoon tea to remember — book Claridge’s. If you want to eat better than almost anywhere else in London and don’t mind paying for it, it’s The Connaught. If you want history, a genuinely great bar, and a hotel that still feels like a slightly eccentric English country house despite being five minutes from Piccadilly, it’s The Stafford. If art and quiet confidence matter more to you than grandeur, choose The Beaumont. And if it’s the view and the room renovation you’re after, London Hilton on Park Lane is the place.
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Amanda O’Brien is the creator and editor of The Boutique Adventurer. She has visited 80 countries and is a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers as well as the IFTWTA. She is passionate about wine had has just completed Level 3 of the WSET. Born in Australia, she lives in London.