he Café Royal, once one of London's most famous restaurants, opened its doors in 1865. The owner, Daniel Nicholas Thévenon, was fleeing bankruptcy in France and had arrived in London two years earlier with his wife Célestine and her savings of just £5. Daniel suffered from diabetes and died in 1897. By the turn of the century this restaurant was the most famous in London. Célestine Nicols took over the management of the Café Royal after Daniel's death and ran it until her own death in 1916.

The illustration depicted on the cover of this menu was one of a series of oil paintings that adorned the ceilings of the restaurant, Grill Room, American Bar and Banqueting Suites and were painted by French artists, refugees from the Franco-Prussian war in 1870.

It may have been inspired by Botticelli’s Birth of Venus,’ now in the Uffizi, Florence.

Over the 143 years that the restaurant was open at 68 Regent Street in London's West End, its fans included Oscar Wilde, who one evening became so drunk on absinthe, he started to hallucinate. He wrote that he saw a waiter watering a field of tulips when in fact the waiter was stacking chairs in the bar. Aleister Crowley, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Noel Coward, future monarchs Edward VIII and George VI, George Bernard Shaw, Brigitte Bardot, Mick Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Muhammad Ali, Margaret Thatcher and Diana, Princess of Wales all enjoyed the pleasures of the restaurant. In 1996, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay had his wedding there. The Café Royal closed its doors as a restaurant for the last time in December 2008. It has now re-opened as a luxury hotel - the Hotel Café Royal.