It was in 1946, when the war in Europe had hardly ended and Venice was still under the control of the Allied armies, that I first poked my nose through the doors of Harry's Bar in Venice.
I was young, rather shy, and extremely unworldly, and I did not know what to expect. From the outside the place hardly looked like a bar, occupying as it did an elegant building like a little palazzo. The frosted glass of its windows made it difficult to peer inside.
I had heard tales of vast prices and an excruciatingly grand clientele.
My friends, feeling much as I did, pushed me through the door first, sheepishly treading on my heels; but the moment I got inside, adjusting my eyes from the sunshine to the shade, I found myself in thrall.

This is how I remember it. The room was smallish and unexpectedly cozy. At the tables around it, sure enough, were smoky-looking, hooded-eyed, tweedy, sometimes hatted, heavily made-up but rather weather-beaten persons I took to be members of the Italian aristocracy. Sitting at the bar were three or four Allied officers, the British looking uncomfortably suave to me, the Americans dauntingly experienced.
The conversation level was low but intense, there was a discreet clinking of plates somewhere out of sight, and a solitary ample man at a table by himself was already well into a plate of scampi. Everybody, even the scampi man, looked up as I made my entrance.
The officers looked up in a cool officerlike way, holding their glasses. The patricians looked up patricianly, rather disappointedly, as though they had been hoping for better things. The fat man looked up with his eyes only.
But it was the contact I had with the three pairs of eyes behind the counter that I remember best - the eyes of the boss sitting behind his cash till beside the door the eyes of the two busy barmen in their white jackets.

Then again, Harrry's Bar is a bar; it began as one, and it remains one. Napoleon said the Piazza San Marco was the best drawing room in Europe; I would nominate Harry's as one of the two or three best saloons. This means that however sophisticated the food, the service must have a particular slickness and intimacy.
Nobody wants to sit around twiddling thumbs in a bar, and Harry's sees to it that your drink arrives almost instantly, followed extremely quickly by your toasted sandwiches. The regulars are addressed by name (or title), the newcomers are welcomed with an extremely soigné but still workmanlike equivalent of "Well, what'll it be?" British aficionados like to call Harry's Bar a pub, and the word is not inappropriate.

At the same time it is a cafe. It offers in some ways the very essence of the cafe society that once played so large a part in the affairs of Europe. It is not that one would normally go into Harry's just for a cup of coffee, though some people do; but the atmosphere of the restaurant, the warm immediacy of it, the company always of people who know each other, the ease of converse, the somehow knowing attitudes of the staff - all these add up to the clublike feeling that all the best European cafes possess. I have often sat for hours alone in a corner of Harry's Bar, working, eating and drinking, watching the people come and go, sometimes greeting acquaintances, sometimes knowing nobody; and I have felt then happily at one with all the myriad poets and novelists, in every European country, who have done their writing alone in the corners of coffee shops.

I am by no means a gourmet; I am certainly not a scowling, smoky countess or a peregrinating socialite; I sit in Harry's Bar generally alone and usually unnoticed. I have, however, though I say it myself, one qualification for writing this foreword: long ago, when I was young and innocent, I recognized the look in the eye of Harry's Bar for what it was - the sign of a truly great restaurant, whose cuisine speaks for itself in the pages of Arrigo Cipriani's books and whose atmosphere I can immediately reconjure, wherever I am in the world, simply by imagining myself opening those doors.

Jan Morris
(from his foreword to Arrigo Cipriani's "The Harry's Bar Cookbook")