Fashion stylist turned London restaurateur, Margaret Crow, has always had a rebellious streak. After being thrown out of eight Dallas high schools her parents sent her to a remote Scottish boarding school, thinking she’d soon be pining for home and changing her ways. The plan backfired. She graduated and talked her way into the London College of Fashion, just ten days before classes started in 2004. The UK has been home ever since, specifically East London, where she met her now business partner, Aussie chef Brett Redman. They became fast friends in 2005 when she’d hang out (and capitalise on wifi) at the café he worked at. Over a decade later, and in Crow’s case an entire career in fashion later, the pair have opened their newest restaurant—the seafood-focused Neptune—which has proved the hottest London opening of the year. Housed inside the Principal Hotel in Bloomsbury—formerly the Russel Hotel where the famous Edwardian Bloomsbury set partied with abandon—Crow and Redman are determined to bring back the elegance and mischievousness of eras past, while adding some modern twists of their own. Here, Crow shares how to be the consummate host, how to avoid a hangover and why seductive lighting is everything.

Image credit: Instagram @neptunelondon