The road that changes the rules
Bishopsgate takes its name from one of the gates in the old city wall, and it still behaves like a border. West of it are the towers, the trading floors and the restaurants with cloakrooms. Walk five minutes east from the Liverpool Street barriers and you are in Spitalfields: Georgian houses built for Huguenot silk weavers, Hawksmoor's Christ Church with its great white spire, and a covered market under a Victorian iron roof.
The distance is nothing. The change in manners is considerable, and a guest who spends most of his London evenings in Mayfair or St James's will notice it inside ten minutes. None of it is difficult. It simply helps to know what to expect, so that a first evening east of the line feels like a discovery rather than a string of small misjudgements.
Lower lobbies
The hotels out here are built lower and run looser. The big hotel on Great Eastern Street has a ground floor that works as a café and a meeting place, full of laptops by day and drinkers by night. The small townhouse hotels in Spitalfields have hardly any lobby at all, just a hall and a staircase. There are fewer doormen, fewer uniforms and nobody standing by the lift deciding who belongs.
For a companion's arrival that is entirely good news. She walks in like anybody else, because in a lobby full of people in jeans nobody looks twice at anyone. What it means for you is that dressing for the lobby stops being a consideration. Dressing for the dinner is the only thing that matters.
Later kitchens, louder rooms
West End dining runs to a curtain. East End dining runs to nobody's timetable in particular. Tables at eight are normal and at nine common, and in Shoreditch and Dalston kitchens often keep going well after the West End has stopped taking orders. The rooms are smaller, louder and plainer, with short menus, shared plates and a kitchen in full view. St John Bread and Wine, on Commercial Street across from the market, is the classic of the type: a white room, a menu that changes every day, and no ceremony whatsoever.
At the far end of the evening, the beigel bakeries on Brick Lane serve through the night, and a bagel at three in the morning on the walk back is a ritual rather than an emergency. The Ten Bells, on the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier Street, has been a pub for a very long time and still looks like one. Very little of this needs booking weeks ahead, which is a large part of its appeal.
Jeans at a good table
A suit is not wrong east of Bishopsgate, particularly on a weeknight near Liverpool Street, but it will read as office. In E1 and E2 the better tables are full of dark jeans, good shoes and a proper jacket, and the man who has dressed down with some care looks more at home than the one who has come straight from a meeting. At the very least, lose the tie.
She dresses for the district as well. For a West End dining room a companion might wear a dress; for a first evening in Spitalfields she will choose something plainer and darker that looks right at a counter and on a cobbled street. If the evening does include a formal room, say so in your message and she will dress for that room instead.
A desk that expects a flat
The biggest practical difference is where the evening ends. In the West End nearly every booking is a hotel. Out here, a large share of them are flats: warehouse conversions, flats over shops, new blocks behind the stations. The desk asks for a hotel and a room number, or for an address, a buzzer name and a floor, and treats the two in exactly the same way.
If you are staying with a friend or in a short let, that is completely normal here and nobody will think twice about it. The three lines a flat needs are set out in our note on warehouse flat visits, and the figures are the same either way.
A first evening, timed
Four hours at £900, starting at half past seven. She meets you at the table on Commercial Street, already seated when you arrive. Dinner runs until half past nine without anybody hurrying you. Then a slow walk up Fournier Street, past the weavers' attic windows and the shuttered doorways, and into Brick Lane for a drink somewhere small. By half past eleven you are back at your own door, in the City or in the East End.
Three hours at £700 does the same without the drink afterwards. The dinner date page explains the arithmetic of lengths around a table. The fee is handed to her in person when she arrives, and every rung of the ladder is printed on rates.
Company who knows both sides of the road
Sonya works Aldgate and the Tower Hill edge of the City, takes dinner dates in the City and E1, and is composed and very hard to impress, which makes her an ideal guide for someone crossing over for the first time. Laura, from Whitechapel, has green eyes, a swimmer's shoulders and an appetite worth keeping up with at a table that orders for sharing. Angelika works the EC2A end of Shoreditch and moves between the City and the East End without appearing to notice the join.
All three are on the toned shortlist, five athletic women and what built them. For somebody who knows Spitalfields yard by yard, Lea works the market side of E1 and is on the auburn list. The rest of the board is a message away, and Aldgate and Liverpool Street are covered on the same terms.
Filed under: most of the names in this note also sit on the toned and athletic list in the shortlists.