The Ivy on West Street, and why the original is not the brasserie

A café the theatre adopted

The Ivy began in 1917 as a small Italian café on West Street, a few steps from the theatres of Cambridge Circus and St Martin's Lane. Its name, as the house tells it, came from an actress who reassured the owner through a difficult early spell by quoting a popular song about clinging together like ivy. Whether or not every detail is true, the theatre took the place to its heart, and through most of the last century the room was where actors ate after the show and where the rest of London went to watch them do it.

That history still shapes the evening. The Ivy keeps theatre hours, takes late tables and treats a booking at a quarter to eleven as entirely normal, which is rarer in London than it ought to be.

For a long stretch around the turn of the century it was also the address where photographers waited on the pavement, a reputation the room itself never encouraged. Inside, the real attraction was the discretion of the staff: whoever sat at the next table, nobody mentioned it. That habit survives. It is a room where two people are left alone to talk, which is the most useful quality any restaurant can offer a date.

Inside the original

The room is instantly recognisable: dark oak panelling, a run of harlequin windows in coloured diamond panes that blur the street outside, and walls hung with modern British art. A refurbishment in the middle of the last decade added a central bar, which turned the room from a series of tables into something with a heart, and made it easier to arrive first and wait for somebody without feeling watched.

Across the road stand the St Martin's Theatre, home for decades to the longest running play in the world, and the Ambassadors beside it. On a busy night the pavement outside fills with audiences at seven and again after ten, and inside, behind the coloured glass, nobody notices either tide.

The Ivy that is not The Ivy

Over the past decade or so the name has been lent to a whole family of restaurants: grills, brasseries, garden rooms and cafés, in London and in towns and cities across the country. The nearest to West Street is the Ivy Market Grill on Henrietta Street, at the corner of the Piazza, bright, busy and open through the day. It shares some of the menu and the green palette, but not a great deal else.

The difference matters when you are planning a date. The original is one room, booked ahead, with a crowd that chose it deliberately. The offspring are bigger, easier to walk into and built for a broader public. Both can be good. They are simply not the same evening, and nobody arriving at one while expecting the other will be quite satisfied.

Which one suits which date

For a first meeting in daylight, the Market Grill is hard to beat: a table by the window, the market going about its business outside and no pressure on the conversation. Nancy, whose front door is a short walk from the market and who has seen the square change around her, likes it for exactly that reason. It is also the easier table to find at short notice.

For an occasion, the original wins without argument. An anniversary, a birthday, a supper after a show at the St Martin's or the Ambassadors, or simply an evening that ought to feel like an event: West Street is the room for it. Bianka, who believes a proper dinner should last three hours and splits every plate down the middle, is at her best at a corner table there. Danielle, with the heavy black hair that places her among the raven haired companions, prefers rooms without music and conversations that go somewhere, and likes the panelled hush of the original for the same reason she likes old films.

If you are unsure, think about what the evening needs to do. A meal that has to fit around something else belongs in the brasserie. A meal that is the something else belongs on West Street.

Getting a table, and the door upstairs

The Ivy was once famous for being impossible to book. It is easier now, but Friday and Saturday evenings and the late tables after the curtain still go early. Book as soon as the evening is fixed, mention the occasion if there is one, and ask for a banquette if the aim is to talk rather than to be seen.

If a companion is joining you, arrive a few minutes before her and take a seat at the bar. It is the natural place to wait, it gives you the first sight of the door, and it means the greeting happens over a drink rather than across a busy aisle between tables.

Above the restaurant sits The Ivy Club, a private members' club with its own entrance and its own rules. Guests of members may go up; everybody else may not, and no agency can arrange otherwise. It is worth knowing simply so that nobody promises you a nightcap upstairs that the building will not provide.

Setting the evening around the table

The Ivy sits at the western edge of this site's home ground, a minute from Seven Dials and a few from Leicester Square station. A companion can meet you in the bar, at your hotel in Covent Garden or at the theatre if the evening opens with a show. For a meal here the natural fit is the four hour dinner date, £900, which allows for a drink beforehand and the walk afterwards without a single glance at a watch. From the hotels along the Strand it is a pleasant walk of ten to fifteen minutes north through the lanes, and a far better start than a taxi crawling round Cambridge Circus.

A supper after the curtain suits a shorter booking, £500 for two hours or £700 for three. Prices for every length are printed on the rates page, and once the table is secured the booking page gives you the message to copy.