Why the market side of Bishopsgate
A client dinner around Spitalfields does two jobs at once. It is five minutes on foot from the Liverpool Street barriers, so guests off the Elizabeth line, the Central line or the Stansted Express can walk it. And it is just far enough out of the City proper that the table relaxes: fewer colleagues at the next table, a plainer room, and a street outside that is worth walking afterwards.
The private rooms around the market come in every shape, from a panelled room upstairs in an old building to a glass room near the top of a tower on Bishopsgate. What matters for a work dinner is not the look but whether the room is genuinely private for the whole evening, and that is something you have to ask about directly, because nobody volunteers it.
Three kinds of private
The first is a proper room: four walls, a door that closes, its own staff and its own lighting. The second is semi private: a part of the main dining room screened off by a curtain, a partition or a change of level. The third is a buy out, where you take the whole of a small restaurant or a whole floor of a larger one.
Only the first and third stay private all evening. A screened section is fine at eight, when the main room is quiet, and porous by ten, when the room is full and loud and your conversation is competing with somebody's birthday. For eight or ten people with things to discuss, a closed room is worth the extra planning. For twenty, a buy out is often simpler than finding a single room that size.
Where people start looking
Hawksmoor on Commercial Street, the first of the steakhouse group, has long kept a private dining room, and it suits a table that eats seriously and talks loudly. Galvin La Chapelle, inside the Victorian chapel on Spital Square, has the most striking dining room anywhere near the market and a private room to go with it. Up on Bishopsgate, the restaurants near the tops of the towers offer private rooms with the whole City spread out below the windows.
Rooms, menus and terms change, and restaurants open and close, so treat these as starting points rather than recommendations. The desk has no arrangement with any of them and has never been paid to name one. What it can do is tell you which rooms guests have found properly private, and which turned out to have the route to the kitchen running through the middle.
What to ask before you hold a room
Ask whether the room has a door, and whether that door stays closed during service. Ask whether anything passes through it: the way to the lavatories, the way to the kitchen, a waiters' station. Ask whether the room is used twice in an evening, because a table that has to be out by half past nine is a very different dinner from one that can stay until midnight.
Ask about sound from next door, especially if the room shares a wall with a bar. Ask whether the menu is fixed in advance or chosen on the night. And ask who your contact will be on the evening itself, because the person who took the booking by email is rarely the one on the floor when the main course is running late.
How early a Thursday needs holding
Thursday is the City's night out, and the best private rooms near Liverpool Street go early. For most of the year, three or four weeks' notice for a Thursday is sensible and a week is a gamble. In late November and December, when every firm in EC2 wants its dinner on the same handful of nights, the good rooms are spoken for months ahead.
The easy nights are Monday and Tuesday, when a room for twelve can sometimes be found in the same week. Wednesday sits in between. If the date is fixed by the client, book the room before anything else; if the date is yours to choose, move it off Thursday and the choice opens up considerably.
Company at a long table
A work dinner is the booking where a companion's particular skill shows most. She arrives on the hour, takes her seat and is introduced exactly as you told the desk. From then on her job is the people either side of her: asking about their work, remembering names, keeping the far end of the table from drifting off. If the client needs you for a quiet word, she will be deep in conversation with someone else before you have turned your chair.
Book the room first, then tell the desk the restaurant, the time, how she should be introduced and whether the evening ends at eleven or moves on to a bar. Three hours at £700 covers a dinner with a drink on either side. Four hours at £900 is the right length when there are speeches, because speeches never finish on time. The fee goes to her in person when she arrives.
Names for a table of twelve
Lea works the market side of Spitalfields and has a memory for every side street, which turns the walk from the barriers into a short tour. Luna is a minute from Liverpool Street, has a head for heights and a talent for late dinners, which suits the rooms near the tops of the towers. Both are on the early twenties shortlist.
For a table where age and gravity count for more, Sonya is on the thirties list: composed, unhurried and very hard to impress on purpose, which at a table of clients reads as authority. The board has everybody else, and the rates page has the whole ladder. For the evening that follows, our note on crossing Bishopsgate covers the streets beyond the market.
Filed under: most of the names in this note also sit on the auburn and red list in the shortlists.