8–9 Jermyn Street was purchased by Messrs. Spiers and Pond, a firm of wine merchants and caterers, who held a limited architectural competition for designs for a large restaurant and tavern with ancillary public rooms.

The list of guest speakers was impressive and varied, including Edgar Wallace, Sir Hugh Walpole, G. K. Chesterton and Bertrand Russell.

[12] Kate Frye, who was a member of the Actresses' Franchise League, would frequently attend and make diary entries on some of those Criterion meetings.

The Second Empire masterpieces of Charles Garnier—the Paris Opera House and the Monte Carlo Casino —seem to have influenced Verity's design, which is carried out in stone, now painted, and is composed of a central face slightly recessed between wings, all similar in width and three storeys high.

As originally completed, however, the first two storeys of the central face contained a great round-arched opening forming the deeply recessed entrance to the restaurant.

A pedestal, with enriched panels in its die, underlines the lofty third storey where the central face has a group of three round-arched windows, their moulded archivolts rising from entablatures above plain piers flanked by Ionic half-columns.

In each of the wings paired Corinthian plain-shafted pilasters flank an Ionic Venetian window, its arched middle light being of the same size as those in the central face, with a fan-shaped lunette of wide and narrow panels, the former ornamented and the latter plain.

The main entablature has an enriched architrave, a plain frieze except for the carved panels in the breaks above the Corinthian pilasters, and a dentilled and modillioned cornice which is returned to form large triangular pediments over the two wings.

One of the restaurant's most famous features is the Long Bar, which retains the 'glistering' ceiling of gold mosaic, coved at the sides and patterned all over with lines and ornaments in blue and white tesserae.

The wall decoration accords well with the real yellow gold leaf ceiling, being lined with warm marble and formed into blind arcades with semi-elliptical arches resting on slender octagonal columns, their unmolded capitals and the impost being encrusted with gold-ground mosaic.

[15] Under the ownership of Georgian entrepreneur Irakli Sopromadze, in July 2009 Marina O'Loughlin reviewed the restaurant for Metro, saying that "The Criterion is the star of the show", but criticised the "dodgy oligarch taste: the crushed-red velvet love seats, the metal statues that look like they’ve been liberated from TK Maxx, the unflattering lighting".

In 1992, after extensive refurbishment, the room was re-opened under the management of Bob Payton's My Kinda Town Restaurant Group as The Criterion Brasserie.

My Kinda Town ran the restaurant until July 1995[19] when the lease was taken by Marco Pierre White who arranged for it to be refurbished by top interior designer, David Collins.

[4] In 2009 Criterion Restaurant was bought by Irakli Sopromadze of VINS Holdings carrying out a "gentle and sympathetic" restoration of the venue including the refurbishment of the premises and upgrading of the kitchen and equipment.

The British opium addict Grosely recalls yearning for the Criterion Bar in W. Somerset Maugham's short story "Mirage" from On a Chinese Screen (1922), where it represents the London of his youth, far from the squalid life he now leads in Haiphong.