Gymkhana Dress Code: What to Wear in Mayfair

The straight answer, as of September 2026: Gymkhana does not publish a dress code that we were able to read on any of its own pages. The restaurant’s website blocks automated access, and its booking page runs on SevenRooms through JKS Restaurants, where house rules appear at checkout for a specific date rather than as a standing public notice. So there is no posted list of banned garments to quote at you, and anyone who hands you one in a forum thread is almost certainly describing what they saw rather than what the restaurant wrote down. What follows is the honest version: what this room is, what people actually wear in it, and the one phone call that settles the question for your particular booking. If you want the booking mechanics instead, they are in how to get a reservation at Gymkhana.

What the room is, which tells you more than a rule would

Gymkhana is a two-Michelin-star Indian dining room on Albemarle Street, built to resemble a colonial-era members’ club: dark wood, ceiling fans, hunting trophies, leather banquettes, low amber light. That interior is the actual dress signal. A room decorated as a gentlemen’s club in the middle of Mayfair, at Mayfair prices, collects a crowd that has already decided to make an evening of it. Nobody is checking your collar, but you will be sitting among people who dressed up a little, and the reported experience from diners is consistently that the room reads smarter than a neighbourhood restaurant and softer than a black-tie dining room. Treat that as the working brief. The safe target is the thing London calls smart casual, which in practice means you look like you chose your clothes on purpose. Everything below is reported practice, gathered from how the room presents and how diners describe it, not a policy we can attribute to the restaurant.

For men

The reliable version is a collared shirt, a decent pair of trousers or dark chinos, and clean shoes. A jacket is welcome and never out of place at dinner, especially in the main dining room on a Friday or Saturday, but nothing we could verify says it is required, and plenty of reported accounts describe men eating there without one. A tie is genuinely unnecessary. On the other end, the things that would make you feel out of place are the obvious ones: gym kit, football shirts, vests, beachwear, anything visibly scruffy. If you are coming straight from an office in Mayfair or the City, you are already dressed correctly and need to do nothing. If you are coming from a day of walking around London in a hoodie, the fix is one layer, not a new outfit.

For women

The same brief, with more room to move. Dresses, tailored trousers with a good top, smart separates, a jumpsuit, a skirt and blouse: all of it reads correctly in this room, and the low light and dark interior are flattering to almost anything with some structure to it. Heels are common and entirely optional, and smart flats are a normal sight, which matters if you are walking any distance on Mayfair pavements. Diners describe the female side of the room as slightly more dressed than the male side on weekend evenings, which is typical of restaurants at this tier in London. The same exclusions apply as above, sportswear and beachwear and anything you would wear to the gym, and again, none of that is a published rule, it is simply the shape of the room.

Jeans and trainers

This is the question everybody actually types into a search box, so here is the careful answer. We found no published ban on either at Gymkhana. Dark, clean, well-fitting jeans worn with a shirt and proper shoes are ordinary in London restaurants at this level and are very unlikely to cause you a problem. Distressed, faded, or ripped denim is a different proposition and is the version most likely to look wrong in a room dressed as a members’ club.

Trainers are the genuinely grey area, and the honest answer is that London has split on them. Plenty of high-end rooms in the city now seat people in clean minimal white leather trainers without comment, and plenty of hotel bars and clubs a few streets from Albemarle Street still turn them away at the door. Because we cannot point to anything Gymkhana has published either way, the risk-free read is this: a clean, plain, leather-look trainer with smart trousers is the version that passes almost everywhere in Mayfair, and a chunky running shoe or a scuffed canvas sneaker is the version that gets noticed. If you own a pair of loafers or boots, wearing them removes the question entirely for the price of nothing. If you care about the answer, phone the restaurant and ask, because a member of the reservations team can tell you what they actually do tonight, which no guide can.

Lunch vs dinner

The room is the same, the atmosphere is not. Weekday lunch at Gymkhana runs lighter and more businesslike, with a visible share of the tables taken by people who work nearby and will go back to an office afterwards, so office clothing is the default and the bar sits a notch lower than it does at eight in the evening. Dinner, particularly Friday and Saturday, is the occasion service: darker, busier, and full of tables that booked sixty days ahead for a birthday or an anniversary. If you are going to overdress on purpose, do it at dinner.

Lunch is also, usefully, the easier table. The booking guide covers why in detail, but the summary is that the same kitchen and the same room face a fraction of the competition at midday, which makes weekday lunch the shortest honest route into this restaurant. It is an unusual case where the softer dress expectation and the softer booking window happen to sit on the same service. For where Gymkhana falls against the rest of the city, the London hard-tables guide has the landscape, and BiBi is the JKS sibling worth knowing about when Gymkhana will not budge.

Where the refusal actually sits

Worth stating plainly, because it is the part that decides any argument at the door: a restaurant may refuse admission, and Gymkhana reserves that right at its own discretion like every other private dining room in London. There is no consumer right to be seated in the clothes you picked. In practice, refusal at a restaurant of this kind is rare and is reserved for the far end of the scale rather than a borderline shoe, and the much more common outcome is a quiet seating in a less prominent part of the room. The related point is that the booking is yours to lose in other ways too: a no-show or a very late cancellation on a table this contested is the thing a venue remembers, and the terms that bind you are the ones in your confirmation email, covered in Gymkhana’s cancellation policy alongside the general shape in restaurant cancellation policies explained. If you are unsure about an outfit and the booking matters, ask when you confirm. One email to the restaurant outranks every forum answer, including this one.

The harder problem is the table

Almost nobody is refused at Gymkhana for what they wore. Enormous numbers of people are refused by the booking page, which is the real gate. The room opens its SevenRooms book at 6:00am UK time sixty days out and prime evenings can be gone inside the hour, and the second chance is a give-back landing at a random hour in the days before a date. SeatSwiper watches the dates and party size you want on Resy, SevenRooms, and OpenTable around the clock and books on your own account in your own name the moment a seat appears. First booking free, then a flat $5 only when it lands one. It can still lose a race for a single table, and it covers those three platforms only. Sort the reservation first, then worry about the shoes.