Bar Americain

Brasserie  was once part of The Regent Palace Hotel, which was built by 'T Lyons & Co. Ltd' on Crown land, and was designed in the Beaux Arts style by Messrs. Henry Tanner, F.R.I.B.A, F.J. Wills and W.J. Ancell. It opened on Wednesday, May 16, 1915; the largest hotel in Europe at the time, with 1,028 bedrooms.

The early 20th century was the architectural heyday of grand hotels and The Regent Palace Hotel had the opulence and scale of a transatlantic liner, with a marble entrance vestibule, a Winter Garden decorated with palms and rattan chairs, and a large Rotunda Court for afternoon tea. It was run by Joe Lyons as a more democratic version of the Ritz, "to make the luxuries usually available to the very rich open to the less well-off". Maids served tea, ran baths for guests and cleaned rooms by plugging tubes into a vacuum system built inside the walls.

In the early 1930s, Oliver Percy Bernard OBE MC (1881 - 1939), an English architect, and scenic, graphic and industrial designer, was commissioned to redesign some of the Beaux Arts interiors of The Regent Palace Hotel.

Generally recognised as one of the key figures in the creation of the art deco style, he was the son of a theater manager and an actress, and his early career was spent as a theater stage hand and scene painter. Rejected for active military service, Bernard travelled to the U.S. before returning on the RMS Lusitania in 1915, surviving its sinking. He continued his theatrical work, and was also technical director of the British Pavilion at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. He increasingly worked as consultant to various organisations, including J. Lyons and Co, defining much of their later house style and designing interiors for their Oxford Street, Coventry Street, and Strand Corner Houses, as well as in 1929, a spectacular art deco entrance to the Strand Palace Hotel.