Cora Pearl

Cora Pearl is a friendly, intimate restaurant with fantastic food and warm, knowledgable service. Excellent for a quiet lunch or a atmospheric, vibrant dinner, we are proud to be a TOP 100 restaurant, and a critics' favourite.

Excellent cocktails, an extensive wine list and a cosy, sophisticated interior all combine to create a mellow, vibrant restaurant serving the buzzy neighbourhood we belong to. We cook smart comfort-food classics as well as more sophisticated dishes, and we'll also rustle up some pasta for your toddler. What makes us really happy is the delight with which people return time and again to our lovely little restaurant.

Cora Pearl was a Nineteenth Century courtesan who started her career in Covent Garden and ended up as the Queen of Parisian nightlife. She was both notorious and yet very refined, able to capture the hearts, and fortunes, of both naïve young bloods and seasoned statesmen alike.

Famed for her wit and her lithe sensuality, she bathed in onyx baths and had herself presented at dinner parties on a huge silver platter with parsley covering her bits! She also became a wonderful saviour to wounded and dying soldiers during the Siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1870, turning her palace on the Champs Elysee into a hospital.

After this she returned to England, famously being ejected from the Grosvenor Hotel by a manager furious to discover that the ‘Lady’ who’d been staying there in luxury for a week was actually the notorious courtesan, Cora Pearl. She wrote her memoirs to try and boost her dwindling income, and finally died in 1886. What a life!