Robin Birley

Spear’s Review

When your late father was the 6f 5in 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 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, but its reputation remains undimmed.

In 2018 Birley followed 5H (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 says, ‘probably that unquantifiable thing known as “genius”.’     

Now in his mid-sixties, Birley’s entrepreneurial verve is strong as ever. Late last year he opened a stylish neighbourhood bakery in Chelsea, the Birley Bakery, which makes a knowing nod to 5H with burgundy- coloured lacquered doors in the same style. It has already been a hit with gourmands and connoisseurs such as Nigella Lawson, Lady Bamford, Pierre Koffmann, the Marchioness of Bath and Lady Dalmeny.

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

Last year the New York Post reported that Birley – with the backing of fellow Spear’s Power Listers David and Simon Reuben – had taken a 20-year lease for a long- awaited club in New York. The two-storey, 12,000 sq ft premises is at 828 Madison Avenue and may even open this year.

With Oswald’s named after his grandfather, society portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley, and the downstairs nightclub at 5H called Loulou’s after his cousin Loulou de la Falaise, the New York outpost is rumoured to be called Maxime’s, after Birley’s aunt, Maxime Le Bailly, Comtesse de la Falaise, a British model in the Fifties who became an ‘underground’ film star in the Sixties.

‘New York has always been an aspiration of mine and of my father’s before me,’ Birley said in an email to the Post last year. But, in his typically discreet style, he has declined to elaborate further – for now.