Regency Café — London's Great Art Deco Greasy Spoon

Order first.

Sit after. Get this backwards at the Regency and you'll hear about it from the room, not just the counter.

A Different Starting Point

Regency Street, on the quiet border of Pimlico and Westminster. Nothing marks it out from the street except the tiling — black art deco panels, a Gill Sans sign, a frontage that hasn't needed updating since 1946.

The café opened that year, and for most of its life was run as a genuine family business — Antonio Perotti and Gino Schiavetta took it on in 1989 and kept it essentially as found for the next three and a half decades. Cream tiles on the walls. Formica tables. Photographs covering what wall space was left, built up over generations rather than curated for effect.

In 2024, it closed. For around eighteen months, one of London's best-known caffs simply wasn't there.

New Owners, Old Café

It reopened under Fevzi and Zafer Gungor, and the announcement did what any change of hands at a place like this does — it worried the regulars.

A no-frills corner café surviving eighty years mostly by refusing to become anything else is exactly the kind of place a new owner can quietly ruin, whatever they intend at the start. The tiling gets modernised. The formica goes. The full English becomes a "full English."

None of that happened. Whatever changed in the transaction, the café itself came back looking and running like the one that closed — same room, same system, same food, the photographs still on the walls. Reviews since reopening have stayed strong, which is the real test of a handover like this: not the announcement, but whether the regulars kept coming back once the doors reopened. So far, they have. Doors open at seven, Monday to Saturday.

How It Works

A single till, a long counter, several cooks working at real pace behind it. You order there first — name given, order called back across the room when it's ready. No table service, no exceptions made for a visitor who hasn't worked out the system yet.

The room fills with council workers on their way in, builders already on shift, and a mix of regulars and first-timers who've read about the place somewhere. Nobody lingers over the ordering. Everybody already knows what they want, which is part of why the whole operation moves as fast as it does.

The café has also spent decades as a location — Vogue shoots, film and television sets drawn to an interior that would be near-impossible to build from scratch. That reputation survived the closure intact; the room itself is still the reason people come to photograph it, not just eat in it.

What's on the Table

Full English, done properly. Sausages with genuine snap. Eggs cooked to order. Chips available at breakfast without anyone treating the request as unusual. Bubble and squeak, when it's on. Strong tea in a thick white mug.

None of it is trying to be anything other than what it's always been — which, after a year and a half dark, was clearly a deliberate choice rather than an accident of continuity.

Wider Context

London has a shrinking number of cafés doing this properly — the genuine old-school caff, rather than the styled version with reclaimed furniture and a menu translated into something more expensive. Rent, retirement, and changing ownership have taken most of the rest of them, often exactly the way regulars feared it would happen here.

The Regency's closure and reopening is the version of that story with the better ending so far. New owners, same café, and the early signs — strong reviews, a room that's filled back up — suggest it's holding.

Why It Earns Its Place

Because it went dark for a year and a half and came back as itself, which is a harder thing to manage than never closing at all.

The same order-first system. The same tiled walls, the same photographs, the same crowd of strangers and regulars finding a table together at seven in the morning. Under new ownership, run so far exactly as the old one left it — and we hope it stays that way.

Regency Café is at 17–19 Regency Street, London SW1P 4BY, open 7am to 2:30pm Monday to Friday and 7am to noon on Saturday. Coverage of the reopening at the Evening Standard. On building an early hour into something that survives past the novelty of it, the Vitae Resets take the same structure into a fortnight of practice.

Related reading: Billingsgate Market — Winding Down by 7 for the market that supplies rooms like this one, London Fields Lido — Saved by the People Who Swam In It for another London institution that came back from closure, and Richmond Park at Dawn — In for the Deer, Out for the View for the same hour outdoors.

Who it's for

• Anyone wanting a proper full English rather than a styled interpretation of one.
• Early risers, shift workers, and anyone up before the rest of London — open from 7am, closed by mid-afternoon.
• Regulars who worried the reopening would change things — so far, it hasn't.