Café Royal

A warming coffee cocktail featuring cognac and hot coffee topped with cream. The French answer to Irish Coffee.

The Café Royal is a cognac-and-coffee preparation whose name honors one of the most celebrated restaurants in Victorian and Edwardian London. The Café Royal on Regent Street opened in 1865, founded by French wine merchant Daniel Nicholas Thévenon — who adopted the Anglicized name Daniel Nicols — and became within years the most fashionable restaurant and café in London. Its Domino Room and Grill Room attracted Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, George Bernard Shaw, James McNeill Whistler, Max Beerbohm, and virtually every significant figure of Victorian and Edwardian literary, artistic, and theatrical life. The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, was a regular visitor. The establishment's prestige made its name a natural brand for a cocktail. The Café Royal preparation traditionally involves setting cognac alight briefly — the flame burning off a portion of the alcohol while caramelizing the surface sugars in a brief theatrical moment — before the flame is extinguished by the addition of hot coffee. The resulting drink inherits both the caramelized character from the flame and the coffee's roasted depth, which interact with cognac's stone-fruit warmth in the same register as the Irish Coffee tradition. The Café Royal closed as a restaurant in 2008 and reopened as a hotel in 2012, but the cocktail named for it endures as an elegant reference to a specific moment in London's cultural history.