This is the Royal Exchange Grand Cafe history and what came after it, covering both restaurants that traded in the courtyard and mezzanine between 2001 and 2019, and the two that have replaced them since. It picks up where the last chapter left off: the 2001 refurbishment that turned Sir William Tite's trading floor into shops and dining. This chapter of Royal Exchange dining history follows four names: the Grand Café, Sauterelle, Fortnum and Mason, and the newest arrivals, Engel and Jang, through one address.
Twenty Years of D&D: The Grand Café
The Grand Café was the anchor of the courtyard for most of two decades. It opened as part of the same 2001 refurbishment that reglazed the roof, run by D&D London, the restaurant group Sir Terence Conran founded as Conran Restaurants, renamed after Des Gunewardena and David Loewi bought into the business in 2007. Alongside the Grand Café, D&D also ran Sauterelle, the Threadneedle Bar and the Gallery from the same building, for about fifteen years in total.
Set directly on the glazed trading floor rather than tucked into a corner of it, the Grand Café traded on scale as much as anything: an all-day brasserie big enough to seat the lunchtime crowd from the offices around Bank junction, under the same glass roof the previous chapter covered. It was one of four D&D operations sharing the building, and by most accounts the one most visitors actually walked through, since it sat at ground level rather than up on the mezzanine.
Royal Exchange Dining History: Sauterelle on the Mezzanine
Up on the mezzanine sat Sauterelle, a 62-seat restaurant named for the grasshopper on the Royal Exchange's own crest; sauterelle is French for grasshopper. This part of Royal Exchange dining history is easy to miss from the courtyard floor below, since Sauterelle's dining room looked down over the trading floor rather than sitting inside it. The Royal Exchange Sauterelle restaurant was refurbished in 2015, when its kitchen turned toward the flavours of Provence and Liguria under chefs Stefano and Piero Leone, and the room itself was redesigned by Russell Sage Studio, in rich blue and cognac tones that reviewers at the time compared to the interior of an ornate French railway station.
D&D's tenancy, covering the Grand Café, Sauterelle, and the bars around them, ended in 2018, when the group's licence over the site expired after roughly fifteen years. The Royal Exchange Sauterelle restaurant's last service is dated to 2018 in some accounts and 2019 in others; this chapter uses 2019, the later and more commonly cited figure.
Fortnum and Mason Takes Over the Courtyard
Fortnum and Mason opened its own bar and restaurant in the courtyard on 12 November 2018, just months after D&D's departure, a 90-cover space serving an all-day menu of Fortnum's classics, from Welsh rarebit to caviar and Champagne, alongside a small retail counter stocked from the Piccadilly store. It was the retailer's fourth restaurant in the UK, and its first inside the City of London.
The move was notable for Fortnum and Mason specifically, not just for the Royal Exchange: a 300-year-old Piccadilly grocer taking on its own standalone restaurant inside a Grade I listed trading hall was a departure from the food-hall counters and hampers the brand is usually known for. In terms of Royal Exchange dining history, though, it kept the courtyard doing broadly what the Grand Café had, just under a different name and a different owner.
Engel and Jang: The Same Operator Returns
The mezzanine itself sat empty rather longer. In July 2024, two new venues opened there, split across the same rooms Sauterelle had once occupied: Engel, a 1920s-Berlin-inspired cocktail bar with its own performance space and terrace on the north and east mezzanine, and Jang, a Korean and Japanese restaurant on the south mezzanine, led by head chef Dana Choi. Both were launched by D3 Collective.
The person behind D3 Collective was Des Gunewardena, the same former D&D London chief executive who had run the Grand Café, Sauterelle and the rest of the building's dining for fifteen years before 2018. This account of the Royal Exchange Grand Cafe history ends, in that sense, back where it started: one operator, one address, new names, twenty years apart.