Trisha's

Down a set of stairs off Greek Street, in a basement that has been a drinking club since long before the neighbourhood was rebuilt around cocktail bars, Soho's bohemian past is still technically open for business. Trisha's — the sort of place with no sign worth noticing, no website worth checking and no interest in being found — is a members' and regulars' bar in the old sense: dark, low-ceilinged, hung with framed photographs and decades of tobacco, and priced as though the twentieth century never ended. Anthony Bourdain came here for The Layover looking for the London that exists behind the West End's neon, and found it: a room where the musicians, writers and drinkers of Soho have been meeting for generations.

The order is a classic cocktail or a beer, and both are cheap by any Soho standard. There is no food to speak of, and no need for any. The pleasure is the room itself — the piano, the photographs of people who used to drink here, the sense that the walls have heard more than most archives. Sit at the bar, order something simple, and listen: this is the sound of a neighbourhood that has been arguing about everything for eighty years.

It is a late place, and it opens when the rest of London is finishing rather than when it starts. Come after a show, in a small group, and dress as though you were not trying. It helps to be a regular, but being curious will often do.

Bourdain's point about London was that the city is not its landmarks; it is its rooms. Trisha's is the kind of room he meant — hidden, unrenovated and completely uninterested in the internet — and coming here is less about the drink than about spending an hour inside the Soho that used to be, while it is still around.