[5] Birley wrote an open letter to members stating that he had been unwell and had " ... tried in vain for nearly a year now to persuade him [Sherwood] that Harry's Bar can only work as a family run business and not as part of a large publicly-quoted hotel group ...As a family we can't agree to his terms which involve short term performance targets that would trigger a buy-out by Orient-Express Limited in the event we fail to meet them.

Lawrence Goldman wrote of the club in Birley's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that "For thin ladies who lunched, as well as American visitors and devotees of Italian cuisine, the food and ambience were sublime.

[1][11][4] The membership of Harry's Bar was described in the New York Times shortly after opening in 1979 as consisting of a "dollop of the titled...and some of the top businessmen around town".

[7] By 1990 Emma Soames felt that the clientele of the restaurant was "classy" and "resembles the departure lounge for Concorde" and spotted Lew Grade, David Frost and Terry Wogan at lunch there on her visit and listed Lord Hanson, Alan Sugar and Gordon White as regular guests.

[12] In 1998 Jonathan Meades described the members of Harry's Bar as being " ... industrialists, diplomats, kings, American widows with an appetite for what the French euphemise as aesthetic surgery, film stars of the old school, dandiacal plutocrats, Mayfair smoothies and the gastronomically earnest" and noted that "Members and staff know each other, are mutually respectful and on amiable terms – there is no doubt a trace of feudalism in all this but it works to the benefit of both sides".

[14] In 2008 banker Bob Diamond hosted a $25,000 a head fundraising event for 60 guests at Harry's Bar organised by Frances Prenn which raised $2 million for John McCain's American presidential campaign.

[8] Jonathan Meades reviewed Harry's Bar in 1998 in The Times and praised its "unflashy opulence, discretion, nothing overlooked, obsessive attention to detail" that served "some of the most exquisite cooking in London".

[9] Harry's Bar has attracted praise from the Italian fashion designers Georgio Armani and Valentino,[17][18] though Frankie Dettori said that the meal was the most expensive he had ever had in London at £1200 for four people.

[19] The head chef of Harry's Bar, Alberico Penati, subjected a waitress to several months of aggressive sexual harassment while she worked there.

[20] Penati would walk around the kitchen dressed in his underpants while making sexual remarks about women and would tell the waitress that he never surrendered "until I see the blood of my victim" and that she would have to be punished for rejecting him.

[20] The chairman of the tribunal, Gordon Etherington, said that Penati had a "grossly inflated sense of his own importance" and had a "bullying and arrogant" approach to staff.

[20] Penati left Harry's Bar after it was bought by Richard Caring in 2007, stating that he preferred to "work for a family-run business not a corporation".