Robin Birley

Spear’s Review

When your late father was the founder of Annabel’s and known to have the temperament of a genius, there is a danger you might never emerge from his shadow. But Robin Birley, son of Mark, needn’t have ever worried about that.

He started his own career as an entrepreneur in the Eighties with a sandwich shop, which grew from the germ of a £20,000 loan into a small but perfectly formed chain that still has around 10 outlets in London.

He is best known, however, as the visionary behind 5 Hertford Street, which many see as the spiritual successor to his father’s version of Annabel’s.

The private members’ club – on Mayfair’s Shepherd Market – was opened in 2012 and was an immediate success. Mick Jagger, Kate Moss and Daphne Guinness all turned up during the first week; the editor of Tatler at the time, Kate Reardon, opined that anyone who hadn’t yet been was ‘a bit of a loser’. Famously, it was also the venue for one of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s early dates.

In 2018 Birley followed 5HS (as it’s known) with Oswald’s, a club dedicated ‘to the glorification of wine’. According to Spear’s columnist Nick Foulkes, the service at Birley’s establishments is almost ‘clairvoyant’. ‘There is an ineffable quality about it,’ he said, ‘probably that unquantifiable thing known as “genius”.’     

Now in his mid-sixties, Birley’s entrepreneurial verve is strong as ever. In late 2022 he opened a stylish neighbourhood bakery in Chelsea, the Birley Bakery, which makes a knowing nod to 5HS with burgundy-coloured lacquered doors in the same style. It has already been a hit with gourmands and connoisseurs such as Nigella Lawson. Birley Chocolate followed in 2024.

But the quiet impresario’s crowning moment may be yet to come.

Birley is poised to open the Carrington, a new 70,000sq ft business club with health and fitness facilities including a 25m swimming pool, as part of David and Simon Reuben’s hotly anticipated One Carrington super-prime development project in the heart of Mayfair. The club will house a number of meeting rooms and drawing rooms of various sizes, as well as numerous individual work areas.

Less certain is the future of Birley’s much-discussed plans for an outpost in New York. Reports first emerged in 2022 that Birley, with the Reubens’ backing, had taken out a 20-year lease on a site for a private members’ dining club on Madison Avenue between 69th and 70th streets. It was reportedly to be called Maxime’s, after his aunt, Maxime Le Bailly, comtesse de La Falaise. 

No further rumblings have emerged in 2024, but if there’s one thing Birley’s decades-long career proves, it’s to never count him out.