Just down the road from the Savoy, at number 100, Simpson's (originally the Grand Cigar Divan, then Simpson's Divan and Tavern) was the centre for serious chess in Victorian times: Crowley played here frequently, even before his Golden Dawn days. It was also a centre for a certain style of traditional roast-beef dining, with its domed trolley service and wood-panelled walls, and it still is.
Crowley dined at Simpson's through the Twenties and Thirties. One evening in January 1920 he had a “great dinner at Simpson's and went on to Desti's club”, and in 1940 he had a bizarre dream that he was going to be hanged in a cupboard at Simpson's (possibly the wood panelling made him think of a courtroom like the Old Bailey, and vice versa).
It was also at Simpson's that he was lunched by novelist Anthony Powell in 1929 in connection with Betty May's autobiography Tiger Woman; Powell was working for the book's publisher, Duckworth. Powell thought his shaved skull gave the impression “that he was wearing a false top to his head like a clown's” and that his features seemed “strangely caught together” in the midst of his face, “like those of a horrible baby”. Altogether, thought Powell, he was “a sinister if gifted buffoon”, with his “ponderous gags”, although on a less buffoonish note Powell also remembered him complaining about the unkindness and backbiting of his fellow occultists.1
Perhaps Crowley's most characteristic moment at Simpson's was when he dined there around 1912 with his mother (and a friend of Neuburg's called Hayter “Teddy” Preston). The days of his religious mother calling him the Beast 666 were long over, and Preston was taken aback when Crowley snatched the menu from her and said “You can have boiled toads, Mother, or fried Jesus.”