David Ellis On the Sauce at Sale e Pepe: Drinks from the Seventies — but there’s life in the old tratt yet

All good things must come to an end. Unless, that is, you’re an old Italian tratt, given the immutable mix of veal Milanese and waiters delivering deafening choruses of Happy Birthday has long proven invulnerable to changing tastes. Still, every now and then, something happens: an owner — one of those big-glasses, brown-trousered sorts who’s been shrinking since about 1985 — disappears entirely, perhaps having run off with a Borrower or something. Retirements occur. Deals are done. And then things begin again; birthdays and breadcrumbs persist.

These places are all over. Knightsbridge has one in Sale e Pepe — albeit a very chic take on the recipe, seasoned to postcode. Fifty this year, the place had a heyday of Hollywood types — Roger Moore arching an eyebrow at Diana Ross, that crowd — which began to quiet in the early Noughties. But a new act has begun, old owner Tony Corricelli having sold up to Los Mochis restaurateur Markus Thesleff, who’s rid the place of its spotlight white, marble floor thing in favour of midnight blues and Tuscan reds. It is always dusk inside. Prices are up, but so is the execution of the food, though the menu does much what it always did. The spirit remains the same; Happy Birthday is still heard.

Where Thesleff has really changed things is at the bar. Before, the idea of even leaning against it felt faintly ludicrous — it would have been constant sorry-sorry-sorrys between sips to those squeezing past — but now there are brass bar seats, and tables to the side for those wanting to settle in. Still small, but space for drinks proper.

Admittedly, Sale is after a pretty niche market: this is for those who casually wander about Knightsbridge on any given evening. Still, for those who do, here’s a spot built to pop in for one perfect, icy Martini, served in a glass with no stem. Nice touch, this — I’ve never quite worked out why an easily toppled triangle is the traditional vessel for a drink known not just to slur speech but movement.

But Sale’s bar does more than that. Its menu, like that of the restaurant, is classic. Look, a Godfather (bourbon, Scotch, amaretto), invented about the time the restaurant first opened, is a little on the nose for a place where a few of the husky-voiced regulars still wear sunglasses indoors, but the Grasshopper (crème de menthe, crème de cacao, fernet, cream) — a drink so Seventies it should come in bell-bottom slacks — proved hard to resist.

The Cadillac Margarita moves things into the Eighties, but with a modern slant, owing to the smoke of mezcal. It might be the best drink here, with a finish that does not so much linger as loiter, flavour with stamina. But they’ll make anything. “I’ll invent something you’ll like,” offered the bartender. I put my hand up; no. “Bedtime,” I said. “All good things must come to an end.”

Cocktails from £15, 9-15 Pavilion Road, SW1X 0HD, saleepepe.co.uk