The Goring Hotel

The Goring Hotel

The night before her wedding, the Duchess of Cambridge stayed here. When peace was declared in 1945, the King and Queen came with their daughters for sausages and scrambled eggs. Every reigning monarch and serving Prime Minister has been welcomed through the doors since Otto Goring opened the hotel on 2 March 1910, and the Royal Warrant granted in 2013, the only one ever given to a hotel, is displayed without particular fuss in the lobby. The Goring is the last family-owned five-star hotel in London, now in its fourth generation, and the accumulated confidence of 115 years of knowing exactly what it is shows in everything from the scarlet-coated footmen at the door to the hand-painted dining room wallpaper where mischievous monkeys hide among the foliage and a family portrait depicts the Goring generations reimagined as The Beatles. Sixty-nine rooms and suites, each individually decorated with bespoke furniture in birds-eye maple, mahogany, and walnut, Gainsborough silks rewoven for the Belgravia Suites from original fabrics used in the British Embassy in Paris, marble bathrooms with Asprey bath products, and a private garden that most London hotels of this size simply do not have, a manicured lawn with scented English borders that fills the garden-facing rooms with light and gives the veranda afternoon tea a quality that is difficult to find elsewhere. The Michelin-starred Dining Room serves seasonal British cuisine with the confidence of a kitchen that has been doing this for over a century, the Beef Wellington a standing argument. The Goring Bar has become one of the better cocktail destinations in this part of London, the Thank You Your Majesty, a vodka, raspberry, yuzu, and champagne creation, the signature order. The Goring is not for people who want a hotel that is trying to be anything other than impeccably, unshowily English. It is for people who find that proposition, in the right hands, considerably more appealing than anything more fashionable. Short version: The last family-owned five-star hotel in London, open since 1910 in Belgravia a short walk from Buckingham Palace, with 69 individually decorated rooms, a Michelin-starred restaurant, a Royal Warrant, scarlet-coated footmen, and the institutional confidence of four generations of Gorings who have never felt the need to explain themselves.