Crowley was a life-long habitué of the Café Royal at the Piccadilly Circus end of Regent Street towards the Soho corner at number 68 (now only a hotel), just a few doors along from Oddenino's – another familiar haunt – at 60-62, the grander building on the circus itself with pillars and Roman-style rustication. Crowley started going to the Café Royal around 1897 and continued right through to the 1940s. Modelled on the great Paris cafes of the mid-nineteenth century Second Empire, with the Napoleonic ‘N’ still featuring on its façade, it was the enduring centre of 1890s culture in London, frequented by Oscar Wilde, Beardsley, and Smithers, along with painters Walter Sickert, Gerald Kelly and Augustus John.
It was also well known to the writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, the great chronicler of the era, who makes his quintessential Nineties character Enoch Soames thoroughly at home there, “in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those upholding mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the pagan and painted ceiling.” The author of two volumes of verse entitled Negations and Fungoids, Soames is also a devil-worshipper (or thereabouts: “It's not exactly worship… It's more a matter of trusting and encouraging”) and as he drinks his absinthe he explains to Beerbohm that here is no such thing as good and bad: “Of course in Art there is the good and the evil. But in Life – no”; “In Life, there are illusions of evil, but…” (and his voice trails away to a murmur).
Crowley felt so at home in the Café Royal that he put adverts for it in his occult journal The Equinox – probably unpaid and unsolicited – announcing “EPICURES are invited to taste the special dishes invented by ALEISTER CROWLEY. This can be done at the CAFÉ ROYAL, REGENT STREET, W. Pivots d’Amour Cro-Cro, Pilaff de Moules a la Santa Chiara, Crowley Mixed Grill, Soufflé Aleister Crowley etc etc.”,
The Café had a more Modernist revamp at the end of the 1920s and continued to be popular with later figures such as Wyndham Lewis. The model Betty May contrasts this smarter and grander Café Royal with the earlier one, which had garish gilt, sawdust on the floor, and marble-top tables (which in those days meant hardwearing cheapness; pie and mash shops also had them).
Crowley had been outraged by the French authorities putting a butterfly-shaped piece of metal over the genitals of Jacob Epstein's new sculpture for Oscar Wilde's grave in Père Lachaise cemetery, so after a guerrilla unveiling of the statue, pulling the tarpaulin off before a crowd of about twenty people recruited from the Left Bank, he hacked it off and then strode into the Café Royal one night wearing it like a codpiece. In Crowley's own telling of the story, Epstein himself was in the Café and appreciated the gesture (Epstein's own telling of the story is less enthusiastic, but confirms it really happened).
On another occasion Crowley is alleged to have entertained a party of guests royally, excused himself from the table to go the gents, and absconded down Regent Street in a taxi, dodging the bill. A no less characteristic and at least semi-apocryphal Crowley story has him practising invisibility – one of the powers in Abramelin – at the Café Royal. He was parading about between tables in full regalia (or in one version wearing a conical hat with stars on it), not catching anyone's eye, when a non-regular asked a waiter what was going on. “Don't worry,” said the waiter: “That's just Mr. Crowley being invisible.”