100 Strand, London WC2R 0EZ
Romano’s at Simpson’s in the Strand is the lighter, brighter counterpart to the Grand Divan below — an all-day grand café lined with expansive windows on two sides, where the formality of Simpson’s gives way to the energy of a classic brasserie. Where the Grand Divan is enclosure and ceremony, Romano’s is daylight and conversation.
The room takes its name from the original Romano’s at 400 Strand — the bohemian restaurant where, as one contemporary put it, the atmosphere was highly charged with greasepaint. In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, it was the gathering place of London’s theatrical world, and Studio Shayne Brady designed the new Romano’s as a tribute to that inheritance.
| Covers | Size | Timeline | Year |
| 120 | 2185 sqft | 24 months | 2026 |
A series of sixteen bespoke portraits celebrates the playwrights and cultural figures who shaped the city’s stage, George Bernard Shaw and T.S. Eliot among them, lining walls that look out over the theatre district they once ruled.
The design detail carries the story further. Faux-marble columns and Wedgwood-inspired friezes lend the room its Edwardian character, while mirroring draws the light deep into the plan.
Green leather banquettes and warm timber finishes bring the comfort of a brasserie; filigree mouldings add fineness overhead. Underfoot and across the marquetry tabletops, a recurring checkerboard motif nods to Simpson’s own beginnings as a chess salon — the same history restored in the Grand Divan downstairs.
The room changes register through the day. Natural light fills the space through its Strand-facing windows in the morning and afternoon; by evening, the lighting shifts toward a theatrical glow, and the brasserie becomes a stage of its own.
Romano’s sits within Studio Shayne Brady’s wider revival of Simpson’s in the Strand, alongside the Grand Divan, Nellie’s and Simpson’s Bar — each room distinct in character, all drawn from the building’s own long story.
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