Under the dome
The centre of the room, around the fountain, with the glazed ceiling overhead. The tables people photograph.
The room
Dinner under
Dinner under
the dome
Most restaurants have a dining room. This one has a domed and gilded ceiling, a stone fountain, and marble the height of the walls.
Look up
The ceiling does
The ceiling does
the talking
The main dining room sits under a coffered dome with a glazed centre, ringed in gilded plasterwork, with daylight coming straight down into the middle of the room.
Below it: banded marble running the full height of the walls, a tiered stone fountain at the centre, and planting tall enough to reach the first cornice. Around the edge, a curving mustard-leather banquette, green velvet and tan leather chairs, and drum pendants in cream and jade.
It is a genuinely unusual room to eat charcoal-grilled lamb in, and that contrast is rather the point. Grand surroundings, generous food, no ceremony about it.
What comes out of the kitchen
Where you sit
Four rather different tables
Tell us which you would like when you book and we will do our best — the room fills from Thursday onwards.
The banquette
A long curve of mustard leather wrapping the bar side of the room, with green velvet chairs opposite. Comfortable, and good for watching the place work.
The bar
Brass, marble and a row of pendant lights. For a drink before dinner, or dinner without the wait.
The long table
Laid the length of the room for a party. Birthdays, work dinners, anything that needs twenty chairs.
Private dining
The details
Worth noticing
The building
You are eating in a bank
Not a converted one dressed up to look old. The actual thing — built for Parr's Bank at the turn of the twentieth century, and listed by Historic England ever since 1952.
Built1899–1902For Parr's Bank
ArchitectsShaw, Willink & ThicknesseRichard Norman Shaw with the Liverpool practice of Willink & Thicknesse
ListedGrade II*The second of three grades
Since28 June 1952List entry 1205939
It was designed by Richard Norman Shaw — the architect of Cragside in Northumberland — working with the Liverpool practice of William Edward Willink and Philip Coldwell Thicknesse, who went on to design the Cunard Building at the Pier Head in 1913–16.
Outside it is granite, striped yellow and grey, with terracotta window dressings and a slate roof — five bays, four main storeys, and a great round-arched entrance.
Inside, the room you are sitting in was the circular banking hall. Historic England describes it better than we could:
Fine interior, circular, with centre round lantern, radiating coffered and carved panels with painted swags of fruits, rich frieze and cornice, 8 triple pilasters striped with green marble, oval medallions. Historic England, list entry 1205939
That lantern is the glazed centre of the dome above you. Those eight striped pilasters are the green-and-white banding running up the walls. The oval medallions are the gilded panels between them. It was all built for counting money, and it turns out to work rather well for dinner.
The bank finally left in 2017, after more than a century. The ground floor was granted permission to become a bar and restaurant in 2022.
The full listing on Historic England
The address
Castle Street
One of Liverpool's oldest streets, running from the Town Hall at the top down to Derby Square — and the heart of the city's old banking and insurance quarter.
It shows in the architecture. More than a dozen buildings along Castle Street are on the National Heritage List for England, this one among them. It is a street built to impress people who were about to be asked for money, and it has aged well.
Elif is at number 22, a few minutes from the Pier Head, the Albert Dock and Liverpool ONE, with James Street and Moorfields stations both a short walk away.
Reservations
Come and see it
Photographs only do so much. Lunch is the quiet way to see the room; dinner is the way to see it full.