Dinner, and the hours on either side of it
A dinner booking is four hours at £900 more often than it is anything else, and the reason is arithmetic rather than ambition. A drink first, a table that takes its time, and the walk afterwards will eat three hours without anybody trying. Three at £700 covers it when the table is booked early and the kitchen is quick. Both figures sit on the rates ladder with her journey already inside them.
The east is unusually good at this and unusually bad at pretending. The rooms worth sitting in out here are small, plain and loud, the menus are short, and nobody is going to make a performance of your evening. Which means the company at the table is doing most of the work, and it is worth reading the board properly before you pick a name.
Suited to dinner dates
Tables that suit a long booking
In Spitalfields the plain room on Commercial Street with the short menu is five minutes from the City hotels and five from Shoreditch High Street, which makes it the easiest dinner in the east to build an evening around. Bethnal Green has the bare tables and the argumentative wine list up on Columbia Road, and the old town hall does a restaurant down its own corridor. Booked at seven, either of those will still have you at the table at ten without anybody hurrying the kitchen.
Further out the shape changes. Kingsland Road is strip lights, ninety dishes and a bill that embarrasses nobody, and a companion who knows it will simply order. Fieldgate Street in E1 is noise, queues and grills going past your elbow. The high tables above Bishopsgate are the opposite of all of it, forty floors up with the whole City underneath, and a kitchen that never shuts.
Who books the table
You do. This desk is not a concierge and will not pretend to hold a table it cannot hold. What Nell will do is tell you honestly which rooms take a two on short notice, which ones are hopeless on a Thursday, and which ones are loud enough that a conversation stays private. If you would rather she picked, say so in the first message and you will get a real suggestion rather than whichever place has been written about recently.
Meeting at the table rather than a lobby
Most dinners here start at the restaurant, not in a hotel. Give the room and the hour and she will be at the table, sitting down, not hovering by a door looking like an arrival. The booked time begins the moment she sits, which is the fair way to count it and the way the desk writes it down. If you want a drink somewhere first, say which bar, and the clock starts there instead.
What she is like over three courses
Lea is the easiest dinner in E1 and is happy to show you Fournier Street for ten minutes beforehand. Patricia and Vanessa both hold a long table well in E2, one direct and one watchful. Sonya is composed, unhurried and hard to hurry, which suits a room that runs late. Thea will take a table by the water in E14 over anything with a view of a street. Anyone else can be asked for the same night.
After the plates go
The walk is the part people remember. Fournier Street at eleven is empty and lit and looks three hundred years old, Columbia Road at the same hour has nothing on it at all, and Narrow Street runs beside the water for four hundred metres and stops being London. If the evening wants to carry on past the booked hours, agree the next length while there is still time to enjoy it rather than letting it drift and sorting it out on a doorstep.
Notice, and what it costs to be late
A day is comfortable for a dinner and the same afternoon is often possible, though Thursday and Friday evenings here fill first. If your table moves, tell the desk as soon as the restaurant tells you, because she builds her run east around the hour you gave. Cancelling with three hours of warning costs you nothing and nobody sulks about it. What does not work is silence, which leaves her travelling to a door that is not going to open.
Two notes worth reading first
Dinner dates, in detail
01What does the four hour dinner length cost?
£900, her travel included, and three hours is £700. A ninety minute booking at £400 is the right answer when dinner is already behind you and the point is the company after it.
02Can she suggest somewhere rather than me?
Yes, and the suggestion will be a room she has actually eaten in. Say roughly what you want, loud or quiet, short menu or long, and the desk comes back with two names rather than a list.
03Does she eat, or just sit there?
She eats. This is a part of London where pushing a plate around would be noticed by the kitchen, and every woman on this roster orders properly and tells you what she thinks of it.
Other nights on the book
The trains stop. We do not.
One message with the date, the time and the postcode, and the rest of the night is arranged quietly, anywhere from Hoxton down to the basin at Limehouse.