The Queen Visits Waugh-Themed Restaurant

The Daily Telegraph reports a return visit of HM Queen Elizabeth II to Bellamy’s, the Waugh-themed restaurant in Mayfair, to celebrate a friend’s birthday: 

The name is both a homage to the gentlemen’s club in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, and a pun on bel ami: French for “pretty friend”, and the title of a Guy de Maupassant novel…It is no surprise that this was the restaurant of choice for Lady Penn to hold her 90th birthday celebration … Bellamy’s is everything that the modern breed of brash, look-at-me restaurants is not: calm, understated, unobtrusive and charmingly old-fashioned, with a few little quirks to remind you that this is London, not Paris: there are fish fingers and Welsh rarebit on the menu, for instance. The Queen last dined at Bellamy’s in March 2006, exactly 10 years ago (Bellamy’s, it seems, is becoming a regular haunt): on that occasion, she ordered the … eel mousse, a modest 25 g of caviar, and roast quail; as pushing the boat out goes, it was hardly the Royal Yacht. What did she eat this time? Gavin Rankin, of course, is far too discreet to say.

Although the article stresses the restaurant’s discretion, it does not explain how the Telegraph got its story. Discretion apparently prevented printing the street or telephone numbers and opening hours. Those are available here. Bellamy’s is the name Waugh used for his description of a fictional men’s club inspired by the one near Mayfair called White’s to which he was elected during WWII. Their contact details are not available, but they do have a Wikipedia site which also records a visit by the Queen having taken place in 1991.

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