Le Cafe LPM opens at The Lanesborough on 9 September, and it has twelve months.
It is the first cafe spin-off from LPM Restaurants, running daily from noon until 10pm with last orders at 9.30. The word all-day is doing some work there, because breakfast is not part of it.
A permanent Le Cafe LPM is planned for Dubai. London gets the one-year version, which makes this both a working Knightsbridge restaurant and a test of how far the LPM identity travels outside a dining room.
It takes over the Garden Lounge
Le Cafe LPM occupies the Garden Lounge at The Lanesborough, terrace included, looking onto Gloucester Crescent. The room is currently the hotel’s cigar bar.
The position is good. It gives LPM a hotel setting without putting the cafe in the lobby, and without asking anyone to travel to the Mayfair restaurant for something shorter.
Four audiences are within reach: hotel residents, Belgravia locals, people moving between Knightsbridge and Hyde Park Corner, and existing LPM guests who want a plate rather than an occasion.
Book it directly. Staying at The Lanesborough does not automatically get you a table in a room that outside diners will also be trying to reach.
All day starts at noon
The menu runs from noon to 10pm, every day.
So this is lunch, afternoon, aperitivo and dinner. Not a morning cafe. Coffee and something sweet are in the offer, but there is no early service published.
Worth knowing if you are staying in the hotel. A nine o’clock espresso and a croissant is The Lanesborough’s own breakfast operation, not this room.
The noon start does buy something, though. One menu can drift from lighter daytime plates into heavier evening ones without a service break, which is exactly the flexibility the format is built on.
Shorter than LPM, and not cheaper
The published menu opens with tapenade and garlic croutons at 18 pounds, smoked aubergine at the same. Tuna carpaccio 32. Fried squid 28. A burrata tartine 26. Marinated octopus 30.
Caesar salad is 28 plain, 34 with chicken, 50 with lobster. A croque monsieur made with veal ham and Comte is 34. The sirloin steak baguette is 39.
Bigger plates: rigatoni arrabbiata 36, grilled prawns 44, veal Milanese 46. Sides are 12.
That is palace-hotel pricing, and it should be read as such before anyone arrives expecting a neighbourhood cafe. The word cafe here describes the rhythm and the hours, not the bill.
Coffee is nine pounds
Espresso, macchiato, americano, latte, cappuccino, flat white, mocha, the iced versions: all nine pounds. Tea the same.
Flat pricing keeps the menu simple. It also turns a single coffee into the clearest test the room will face.
At nine pounds the cup is not the product. The table is, and the terrace, and the water, and whether someone lets you sit for forty minutes with a book. That is what the price has to buy.
A hotel cafe can charge a premium for the setting and the hospitality, and the good ones do. It stops working the moment a guest feels moved along, or steered towards a full meal because the table is worth more than the coffee.
The desserts keep the LPM thread
Three of them: Menton lemon with mascarpone at 20, creme caramel at 18, and LPM’s dark chocolate mousse with sea salt at 18.
The mousse is the continuity with the parent restaurant, the thing regulars will order without reading. The Menton lemon puts the Cote d’Azur on the menu once, properly, instead of scattering French references across every course.
Early reporting suggested pastries would be part of the daytime identity. The published all-day menu lists those three plated desserts and no bakery counter.
If you specifically want pastries to take away, confirm before you go rather than assume it from the launch announcement.
The cocktails are their own list
Five at 24 pounds each: a Tomato and Olive Oil Sour, a Fig Leaf Negroni, an Artichoke Sour, a Peach Fizz and a Cafe Martini.
None of them is a straight lift from the main restaurants, which is the right decision. A spin-off that reprints the parent’s signature list has not really opened anything.
Three alcohol-free drinks at 17. Champagne from 25 a glass. The cheapest rose listed is 19 by the glass, 59 the bottle.
The drinks tell you where the money is expected to come from. This room needs guests who stay past the coffee.
A residency is a way of testing something
LPM built its identity on French Mediterranean cooking with Italian influence, dishes to share and a room with noise in it. The first London LPM opened in 2007.
Le Cafe LPM takes some of the ceremony out and stretches the useful hours. You can come for a tartine, a late lunch, a coffee, a drink or a full dinner without every visit following the same shape.
Twelve months is long enough to learn something and short enough to walk away from. Dubai gets the permanent version; London gets the experiment, which is a sensible way round.
The question it has to answer is whether guests read the cafe as its own reason to go, or just as LPM with fewer dishes.
What the hotel gets
The Lanesborough gains an established restaurant name without having to invent, staff and launch another concept of its own.
It also gains outside traffic, and a Garden Lounge that has a reason to be busy at four in the afternoon as well as at eight.
A popular outside restaurant creates its own pressure, of course. Residents will expect to walk in, and the restaurant needs the non-residents to fill it. Whether that holds depends on table management, on what the hotel tells its guests at check-in, and on how long the terrace stays usable once October arrives.
A year is a year, and no more than that
Everything published describes this as a one-year residency.
No final service date has been given, so nobody should be writing that it closes on 8 September 2027.
It could end, extend or turn into something else. None of those has been announced, and all three are ordinary outcomes for an arrangement like this.
Treat it as a real restaurant with a defined shelf life. Not a pop-up, not a permanent addition.
What to confirm when you book
- Table: inside the Garden Lounge or out on the terrace.
- Weather: whether an outdoor booking moves inside automatically.
- Hotel guests: whether residents get any reservation priority.
- Service charge: what goes on top of the published prices.
- Dietary needs: which dishes can be adapted safely.
- Pastries: whether anything is served beyond the three listed desserts.
- Groups: the largest ordinary table, and what happens above it.
Luxury.it perspective
Le Cafe LPM is not a cheaper LPM. Nine-pound coffee, a 34-pound croque monsieur and a 50-pound lobster Caesar settle that question on the first page.
What has actually changed is time. LPM is adapting a dining-room identity to a room that has to work from lunch through coffee and aperitivo into dinner, without every visit becoming an event.
Twelve months is enough to find out whether that flexibility brings a new audience through the door, or just splits the one they already have.
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