For British people, America is an idea brought by cinema, and The Dover, the New York Italian bar and restaurant in Mayfair, meets a version of it. It’s not quite the ballroom in Some Like It Hot, not quite Rick’s Café in Casablanca, but it’s as close as you will find near Green Park Underground, and that has a charm to it, because Americans can speak. It’s from Martin Kuczmarski, formerly of the once preening, now ragged Soho House. He has named his company Difficult Name. There’s a message there, and a story, and it made a glorious restaurant with the tagline ‘A good place to be since 2023’.
It smells of good wood and hard alcohol, and it is ideal for winter, being a cave
The Dover has the confidence Britain lacks, and it is behind a black awning on a Portland stone townhouse. It’s on Dover Street which is, among other things, the site of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones Club, but The Dover is nothing like it, thank God. The entrance hall is ruby red and features – and this is notable nowadays – a reservations book made of paper. (The website is likewise understated, which also causes comment. Are we in 1983?) Pass through a black curtain, real and metaphorical – like Titanic, The Dover never sees daylight – and find a long, dim Art Deco bar made for plotting or even romance. It has chequered floors – is life chess? – and deep, buttery leathers. (I have been on a lifestyle press trip. Can you tell?) It smells of good wood – walnut, apparently – and hard alcohol. It is ideal for winter, being a cave. Kuczmarski has placed a record player on a shelf: above it, Diana Ross’s All the Great Hits is on display.
I don’t drink alcohol but, if I did, I would drink it here: despite its fashionable status the bar is walk-in only, like a pub, and as such it is charged with jeopardy. I can imagine Rick from Casablanca face-down in whisky and his own shame, nodding to All the Great Hits.
The dining room is at the back: it is small and plush. This is a place where you can hear your internal monologue: music has destroyed more restaurants than musicians have destroyed themselves. It is more Art Deco: fine woods, bright white tablecloths, pretty glassware from a ship of fools.
Fashion is a carousel, and Italian food is fashionable now in London: Dear Jackie at the Broadwick Soho Hotel is The Dover’s obvious twin, but The Dover is more understated: Dear Jackie thinks the 1970s weren’t quite luminous enough.
It is Italian-American comfort food, and in winter what is better than that? What is better at any time? There is Tuscan minestrone and prawn cocktail, rumoured to be invented during Prohibition, because if you can’t drink Irish whiskey then drink an aquatic crustacean instead; Dover’s chopped salad; spaghetti meatballs; lobster bisque ravioli; rib-eye; the ‘Dover’ sole. We have hot penne arrabbiata with tomato, chilli and garlic (£15 or £19); beef arrosto and mash (beef thinly sliced, with red wine sauce, £36); rib-eye with peppercorn sauce (£51); baked cheesecake brûlée (£15).
If not cheap, this is the finest of populist fare, and it reminds me of the 21 Club in New York City: Ian Fleming’s favourite speakeasy, according to Diamonds Are Forever. The 21 Club stored the wine of corpses in the basement. If you left a bottle there, they marked it with your name and kept it for you, whatever your state: Ozymandias with a bottle, now destroyed. 21 closed during the pandemic: I don’t know what happened to the wine. The Dover is its cousin, an analogue gem in a city of restaurants broken by Instagram. Book it now for St Valentine’s Day. If you can still feel anything, that is.
The Dover, 33 Dover St, London W1S 4NF; tel: 020 3327 8883.
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