Four hours at £900, with a dinner in the middle of them

Who reserves the table

You reserve it, under your own name, and pass Delphine the address and the hour. Where a room is difficult, say so: several of the circle have been eating in the same dining rooms for years and know which corner is worth asking for and how early to ask for it. What this house does not do is telephone a restaurant on your behalf or let its name anywhere near your reservation.

Meeting at the table or at your door

Either works. A guest staying at a hotel usually has her call at the room, so that the four hours open with a drink downstairs rather than with somebody waiting alone at a restaurant bar. If you are coming straight from a meeting, she can be at the restaurant ten minutes before the booking instead, and the hours begin when she arrives there. Tell Delphine which, and the name the table is under.

The rooms the circle actually likes

Mayfair is written from more than anywhere else, and the choices inside it run from a marble oyster counter on Mount Street to a room dramatic enough to be worth looking at and loud enough that a quiet conversation becomes oddly private. Knightsbridge is the other favourite, whether that means a seat over a grill or a fifth floor table taken while the light still comes through the glass.

Park Lane suits a guest who wants a large room to disappear into, loud enough that the next table hears nothing. Belgravia is the opposite choice: a small dining room down a mews, a wine list taken seriously, and a street outside quiet enough to walk along after eleven. Nobody here will pretend a famous room is a good one if she has eaten badly in it. Ask, and you will be told.

How the four hours usually fall

Forty minutes on a drink before the table, because an evening that begins seated begins at a disadvantage. Two hours over dinner, which is the natural length of one when nobody is counting. Then a walk, which almost every woman in this circle proposes without ever being asked to, and the last of the four hours wherever the two of you decide to spend them.

None of it is timed against a clock on the table, and Delphine will say plainly on the night whether the diary allows a fifth hour.

Dress, and telling her the room

Name the restaurant and she arrives dressed correctly for it, which matters more in some dining rooms than in others. A handful of them at the Piccadilly end still care about a jacket, and it is worth knowing which before you reserve rather than after. If the evening is black tie, say those two words and it is handled without any further correspondence.

Names at their best across a long dinner

Vanessa lets three hours at a table pass without them ever feeling long. Michelle orders generously and pushes half of it across the cloth, and takes real offence if you decline. Liana improves steadily from the second hour on and talks about food as a thing to be got right rather than performed. Nancy is never once in a hurry about any part of it. Those four and the rest are in the Salon, and the figure is the same whichever of them says yes.

What follows the table

Whatever the two of you decide, and the deciding is yours rather than hers. Should the evening be going well and you would rather have the night than the evening, one line to the switchboard rewrites it as dinner until morning at the corrected figure, rather than hours being added loosely at the table. Your companion is told the new number before you are.

If the evening has to move

A table lost at the last minute is not a disaster. Tell Delphine, and your companion will generally know two rooms nearby with space at that hour. If the date itself has to change, three hours of warning or more costs nothing and the evening simply moves to another night. Inside two hours, half the agreed figure stands, as it does for every length printed at rates.