5 Hertford Street

Most Londoners who have heard of 5 Hertford Street have heard of it precisely because they cannot get in. Robin Birley opened the club in 2012 as the more discreet answer to the world his sister Jemima and India Jane Birley moved in, and it has kept that reputation for secrecy deliberately intact ever since: no photography permitted inside, no press list, and membership that reportedly runs to several thousand pounds a year before a guest has ordered a single drink.

The building itself, on the corner of Hertford Street in Mayfair, was fitted out by the Turkish designer Rifat Ozbek in a style that favours rich colour and pattern over minimalist restraint, spread across a restaurant, several bars and, in the basement, the nightclub Loulou’s, named after Birley’s late mother. The layout is designed to let members move between registers of the evening, from a formal dinner upstairs to something looser and later downstairs, without ever leaving the building.

Members and their guests come for exactly the thing the club is built to provide: privacy. Politicians, financiers, actors and minor royals are said to dine here precisely because nobody outside will ever hear about it, which makes it an unusually difficult subject for an honest public review, since almost everything that makes it distinctive is, by design, unverifiable from outside.

Access is the whole story, more so than at almost any other club in this list. Without a member to bring you as a guest, there is no route in at all: no website booking form, no public menu to assess, no photographs to judge the room by beyond the odd leaked image. That level of closure is unusual even among London’s private members’ clubs, most of which allow at least some public visibility into their dining rooms.

The honest caveat: because so little about the food, service or atmosphere is independently reviewable, anyone considering this entry should treat it as a description of what the club is and how it operates, rather than a genuine rating of what a meal there is actually like, since that experience remains, deliberately, out of reach for almost everyone reading this.