Strike Location A Day
Day 345
The Ritz
150 Piccadilly, Mayfair, London
Cormoran reveals to Robin where they are going to celebrate her 30th birthday. What happens once they arrive at The Ritz? Well that’s for another day...
The current unknown is what kind of champagne experience Cormoran had booked for Robin and himself as there are three possibilities. He may have taken Robin to the Rivoli Bar just for champagne. The Art Deco bar offers light lunches or dinners alongside an impressive list of over 80 cocktails and different Champagnes of the month.
The second experience would have been an Champagne Afternoon Tea. Priced from £80 per person, evening bookings are at 17:30pm and at 19:00pm and last for about an hour and a half. A quintessentially British institution and famous world over, Afternoon Tea at The Ritz takes place in the opulent surrounds of The Palm Court. The service offers a selection of finely finger cut sandwiches, freshly baked scones and sweet English pastries alongside a choice of 16 loose leaf teas and Ritz Champagne. The Ritz in fact has its own brand of Champagne, which is made for the hotel by Barons de Rothschild. Today, on average, 400 people visit the Palm Court every day to enjoy the quintessentially English tradition.
The third, and most expensive, experience Cormoran could have paid for is an actual sit down meal in the Ritz Restaurant. Opened in 1906 and with its sparkling chandeliers, towering marble columns and soaring floor to ceiling windows overlooking Green Park, the Ritz Restaurant is often described as the most beautiful restaurant in the world. It offers a menu of distinctive classical French and British dishes.
Located in the heart of London overlooking Green Park, The Ritz is a symbol of high society and luxury and the hotel is one of London’s most prestigious. Opened by Swiss hotelier César Ritz in 1906, the exterior is both structurally and visually Franco-American in style with little trace of English architecture, and is heavily influenced by the architectural traditions of Paris.
César Ritz was very passionate about detail and elegance. The width of each corridor was designed to enable two ladies to walk comfortably in crinolines petticoats, side by side, while the lighting in the Rococo-style restaurant was chosen to be the right shade for a woman to look her most beautiful. The Ritz was actually the first hotel in the world to allow women to come unaccompanied by a male chaperone for Afternoon Tea.
The hotel has attracted a host of both famous and fashionable guests. During its early years, the hotel enjoyed the patronage of The Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) and other iconic figures include Charlie Chaplin, English playwright Nöel Coward, and Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle met in the Marie Antoinette Suite to discuss operations during the Second World War. The Queen danced the conga through The Ritz hotel in 1945 on VE Day with her sister, Margaret, after slipping incognito into the crowds that were celebrating in central London.
The Ritz is the only hotel in the world to have its name in the Oxford English Dictionary, which it entered in 1925. The informal term, ‘ritzy’, derives from the hotel, meaning fashionable, glamorous and expensive. The phrase 'puttin(g) on the Ritz' is recorded from 1911, and was later used by Irving Berlin in his 1927 song, and for the 1930 musical of the same name.
The Ritz has set its own service standard so high that many people are required to achieve it. There is an average ratio of 2 staff members to every guest. Ritz porters pride themselves on being able to fulfill any request, so long as its legal. An American ambassador once asked for a helicopter to be purchased on his behalf, while another guest requested a battleship. Talk about pushing the boat out...
That’s a wrap on #StrikeLocationADay. Over the past year we have posted:
🗓 345 Days
📚 5 Books
🗺 521 Locations
📷 2391 Photos
🖋 853 Quotes
🎞 8 Videos
We hope you have enjoyed this visual journey and that you have been left feeling visually enriched by the real world of Cormoran and Robin.
#StrikeLocationADay was a photo series, which started on the 6th April 2020 and posted one Cormoran Strike location everyday, in chronological order from The Cuckoo’s Calling to Troubled Blood.
The series ran both here on Tumblr and on Twitter (@tottenhamstrike) using the hashtag #StrikeLocationADay