You know the moment: a table booked off a list you found in a search result, a walk across town in good shoes, and a shuttered door with a letting board on it. Champagne bars are unusually good at doing this to people.
So before the list, the corrections. Voltaire at 19 New Bridge Street has permanently closed. Texture in Marylebone has gone, and its domain no longer resolves. And the Oscar Wilde Bar is not at Hotel Café Royal any more. That is the one piece of news here worth being pleased about, because of what took its place.
Here are the rooms in London that are pouring this month.
Bob Bob Ricard, Soho and the City
Every booth has a button marked Press for Champagne. It is a very good piece of restaurant design and it has been working since the Soho room opened in 2008: all-booth seating, a classic British and French menu, and a device that removes the awkward moment in ordering a bottle.
There are two rooms now. The Soho original is on Upper James Street. The newer one is at Level 3 on Leadenhall Street. Choose that one if the evening starts after work in the City.
Bob Bob Ricard, 1-3 Upper James Street, London W1F 9DF, and Level 3, 122 Leadenhall Street, London EC3V 4AB, Tel. +44 203 145 1000, www.bobbobricard.com
Cakes and Bubbles, Hotel Café Royal
The room that replaced the Oscar Wilde Bar is Albert Adrià’s first restaurant outside Spain, and it pairs pastry with a champagne and sparkling list rather than the other way round. That sounds like a novelty and is not: the Tickets cheesecake is one of the great desserts in London and it wants a glass of something dry next to it.
It opens daily from 12:00 to 21:00, with the last seating at 20:00, and there is a terrace on Regent Street for the weeks that allow one. Book it as an early evening rather than a late one.
Cakes and Bubbles, Hotel Café Royal, 70 Regent Street, London W1B 4DY, Tel. +44 20 4571 6745, cakesandbubbles.co.uk
Vertigo 42, Tower 42
Forty-two floors up and over 400 feet, with the windows doing the work no interior designer could. Champagnes from the big houses, cocktails alongside, and a menu of sharing platters, charcuterie, smoked salmon and blinis with crème fraîche that is pitched exactly right for a room where nobody came to eat.
Two rules. It takes reservations and it means it. And it closes on Sunday. That catches out anyone treating it as a weekend view.
Vertigo 42, Tower 42, 25 Old Broad Street, London EC2N 1HQ. Monday to Friday 12:00 to 16:30 and 17:00 to 23:00, Saturday 17:00 to 23:00, closed Sunday. Tel. 020 7877 7842
St Pancras by Searcys
The bar on the Grand Terrace has been rebranded as the St Pancras Bar & Brasserie, and it is still the glass to have before a train: Art Deco fittings, dining rooms looking down over the concourse, and a train to Paris underneath you. Arrive early for the Eurostar rather than late, and the delay becomes the point of the evening.
St Pancras by Searcys, Grand Terrace, Upper Concourse, St Pancras International, London N1C 4QL, Tel. 0207 870 9900, stpancrasbysearcys.co.uk
Champagne + Fromage, Covent Garden
The proposition has not moved in more than a decade: grower champagne only, sourced from independent French producers, with cheese to match. Which means you drink names you will not find on a hotel list, at prices that reflect a small producer rather than a marketing budget.
It has grown to six sites, including Crystal Palace, Greenwich, Chester, Harrogate and Bath, but Wellington Street remains the one to walk into before the theatre. It opens Monday 17:00 to 21:00, Tuesday to Thursday 13:00 to 22:00, Friday and Saturday 12:00 to 23:00, and Sunday 12:00 to 21:00.
Champagne + Fromage, 22 Wellington Street, London WC2E 7DD, Tel. 020 7240 1604, www.champagneplusfromage.co.uk
Catch, Andaz London Liverpool Street
Catch is the champagne bar in a hotel that is really the old Great Eastern in disguise. Go and look at the 1901 Ballroom and its stained-glass dome before you sit down; it is the reason to choose this address over any other bar within walking distance of Liverpool Street.
The Andaz also runs The George, Miyako and Eastway, so the evening has somewhere to go afterwards without a taxi.
Catch, Andaz London Liverpool Street, 40 Liverpool Street, London EC2M 7QN
Archer Street, Soho
The staff here are singers and actors who have worked the West End stage, and they perform during service. It should be unbearable. It is not, because they can actually sing, and because two floors of Soho basement is the right room for it.
Brunch events run £10 to £25 and are the cheerful way in. For the evening, book and go late.
Archer Street, 3-4 Archer Street, South Soho, London W1D 7AP, Tel. 020 7734 3342, www.archerstreet.co.uk
Related: London’s best tasting menus for the dinner the bottle is meant to precede.
If the bottle is the evening rather than the prelude to it, go to Vertigo 42 and book a window. If it is the prelude, walk from Champagne + Fromage to a tasting menu a few streets away, and let Covent Garden do the rest. More of our London restaurant guides will fill in the table.