Monday Madness at L'Escargot: Six Oysters, a Glass of Champagne, £19.27
As Soho's oldest French restaurant counts down to its centenary, it is giving the capital a reason to venture out on a Monday — starting with an oyster-and-Champagne deal priced as a nod to 1927.
L'Escargot has decided that Mondays deserve better. As it counts towards its hundredth birthday next year, London's oldest French restaurant is turning the start of the week into 'Monday Madness' — a standing weekly invitation to something a little wackier than the usual, with a fresh reason to cross town laid on each Monday. It is, quite reasonably, keen to turn its considerable online following into actual bodies at actual tables.
The opening gambit is a beauty. Six plump Maldon rock oysters and a glass of Joseph Perrier Champagne, for £19.27 — the price a wink at 1927, the year L'Escargot took its name at No. 48 Greek Street. It is, by some distance, the most charming maths in Soho, and worth the trip for the number alone.
For the uninitiated, L'Escargot is one of Soho's great survivors. Georges Gaudin opened a snail-serving restaurant at 26 Greek Street in the 1890s — the first in England to put the escargot on a plate — before moving to the larger Georgian townhouse at No. 48 Greek Street in 1927 and farming his snails in the basement.
The plaster Gaudin still rides his snail above the door, 'slow but sure.' Coco Chanel and Maurice Chevalier came in the early days; Princess Diana, Mick Jagger and Elton John in later ones. Nearly a century on, it remains one of the finest tables in Soho.
Tables can be booked online at lescargot.co.uk, or — as they like to put it — the old-fashioned way, on (020) 7439 7474. The oysters, one suspects, will not last the evening.
