London

London's restaurant record begins in the coffeehouse. By 1663 some 83 were trading, and Jonathan's, Lloyd's and Garraway's doubled as commercial rooms in which stockbroking, insurance and auctioneering took shape. In 1798 Thomas Rule opened an oyster bar in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden; it survives as Rules, the city's oldest restaurant, still built around British produce and game.

Hotel dining reset the terms in 1890, when César Ritz and Auguste Escoffier arrived at the Savoy from Monte Carlo — Escoffier's Pêche Melba dates from that tenure — and Ritz pressed a mixed-company continental room on a city where men had dined in clubs. Both were dismissed before the decade closed; Ritz opened his own London hotel in 1906. Drinks followed the same channel: Harry Craddock, who left the United States under Prohibition, joined the Savoy's American Bar in 1920, popularised the dry Martini, compiled The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), and later served as the Dorchester's first head barman and co-founder of the United Kingdom Bartenders' Guild.

Migration and revival define the modern record. Veeraswamy opened on Regent Street in 1926 and remains Britain's oldest surviving Indian restaurant. In 1994 Fergus Henderson's St. JOHN, in a former smokehouse beside Smithfield market, placed offal and whole-carcass cooking — "nose to tail" — at the centre of modern British kitchens.