This is a map of 58 rooms in London where champagne is taken seriously. Grand hotel bars, restaurants with cellars worth the trip, and the handful of places that exist for champagne and nothing else. It is not a directory. Venues were left off for being thin, and four were removed for having closed.
London’s grand hotels publish their cocktail lists online and systematically withhold their wine lists. The Savoy, the Connaught, Claridge’s, the Berkeley, the Dorchester and the Ritz all price a Negroni to the pound on their own websites and will not tell you what a glass of champagne costs.
The obvious move is to guess and present the guess as a fact. This map does not do that. Every price carries a flag saying where it came from, and a venue that publishes nothing gets an empty list rather than a plausible invention.
Read from the venue’s own current published list, with the document and its date recorded. Every wine and every price on these entries came off that list.
From a dated third-party menu or review, with the source recorded. No venue currently sits in this tier.
No usable pricing published anywhere. There is a single estimated glass price, used only to colour the pin, and it is labelled as an estimate wherever it appears. The pour lists are empty because we would rather show you nothing than show you something we made up.
A solid pin is a venue whose list we read. A hollow ring is a venue we are estimating. You can see the difference at a glance, without opening anything.
By default a pin is coloured by price tier, worked out from the cheapest glass rather than the cheapest bottle. Entry-level bottle prices in London cluster between roughly £80 and £125 almost everywhere, which separates nothing; the glass price is where rooms actually differ, and it is the number that answers the question this map is for.
Colour can be switched to champagne style or occasion, which is more useful than it sounds once you have zoomed into Mayfair and discovered that almost every pin there is the same shade.
Nought to a hundred, blending the depth of the bottle list, how well you are served wanting a single glass, the room itself, and value. It has one known bias worth stating: a venue that publishes its list can be measured, and one that does not sits on a class prior, so transparency is quietly rewarded. Read the score next to the confidence flag, which is why the app never shows one without the other.
This is an installable app. On an iPhone, tap Share in Safari and then Add to Home Screen; on Android, Chrome will offer to install it. Once installed it opens without browser chrome, and every venue and map tile you have already looked at keeps working without a signal, which is the situation you are usually in inside a basement bar.
Every price records the document it came from and the date it was read, and each venue’s entry shows how old its prices are. A weekly job re-fetches every recorded source and compares a hash of its text, so a list republished at the same address is noticed rather than silently believed. Anything older than four months is flagged in the app as possibly having moved on.
The larger job is finding lists in the first place. Most of these venues turn out to publish dated PDFs on a hotel group asset server, linked from a page built in the browser and therefore invisible to a simple fetch. A monthly crawl re-checks the rooms that publish nothing, because some of them start.
Lists change, rooms close, and a price checked in July is a price from July. Everything here carries the date it was last checked. If something is wrong, it is wrong because the source was wrong or the source moved, and it is worth telling us.
Map tiles by OpenFreeMap and OpenMapTiles, data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Base style hand-drawn for this app. Set in Fraunces and Schibsted Grotesk.