Why a good dinner begins an hour before anybody sits down

The trouble with beginning at the reservation

Most first dinners are arranged backwards. The table is booked for eight, the companion is asked to meet you there at eight, and the evening is expected to begin the moment two chairs are drawn out. What actually happens is that the first half hour is spent on everything except each other. Coats go to the cloakroom, menus arrive, somebody asks about water, the wine list is handed across, and two people who have not yet exchanged a proper sentence are invited to agree on a bottle.

None of this is unpleasant, but all of it is done in front of an audience and at the kitchen's pace rather than your own. By the time the first course is cleared the conversation has only just found its feet, and a good part of the evening has been spent getting ready to have it. A table is an excellent place for the middle of an evening. It is a poor place to start one.

What an hour at a bar does instead

Open the booking an hour earlier, somewhere quiet and close to the restaurant, and the order of things rights itself. A bar asks almost nothing of you. There is one decision to make, which is what to drink, and after that you are two people sitting side by side rather than facing one another across a cloth, which is by some distance the easier arrangement for a first conversation.

The hour does three things. It lets the introductions happen without a waiter at your elbow. It gives the conversation time to find its subject before anybody is asked to choose between the turbot and the lamb. And it leaves you a short walk to the restaurant, which is where most evenings quietly become easy. You arrive at the table as two people already halfway through a conversation, the staff read you accordingly, and the dinner is spent on the dinner.

A drink beforehand is not the same thing as arriving early. The point is not to fill time until the table is ready, but to make the table the second act of the evening rather than its opening scene.

Where to spend it near Berkeley Square

The streets around Berkeley Square are well made for this, because so many of the good dining rooms of Mayfair lie within ten minutes' walk of it, and so many of the quieter bars sit inside hotels, where nobody expects a drink to be the whole of your evening. The square itself, with its great plane trees and its railed garden, is the natural hinge between the two.

Five minutes west along Mount Street, the house set back into Carlos Place keeps two bars under one roof. One is famous, and on most evenings the busier of the two. The other is the calmer, with windows over the place itself, and for an hour of conversation rather than of theatre it is usually the better choice. Closer to the square, the hotels on Charles Street and Stratton Street keep bars of their own, and on a weekday evening they have the particular merit of being unremarkable, which for this purpose is exactly the recommendation you want.

What to avoid is the loud room on a Friday, where you are shown to a table rather than a seat and the music is part of what is being sold. The hour before dinner is for talking, and the bar you choose should let you do it without leaning in.

Arranging the evening in the right order

In practice this changes only the order of your message. Tell me the time of the table first, and then ask for your companion to arrive an hour before it at the bar you have chosen. If you are unsure which bar, say so and I will suggest one within a short walk of the restaurant, since the whole point is lost if the two are separated by a taxi ride.

The long table was made for evenings of precisely this shape. Four hours at £900 covers the hour at the bar, a dinner that does not need to be hurried, and the walk afterwards, with a little room at the end for a last glass wherever the evening happens to settle. A shorter dinner fits comfortably inside three hours at £700. Every length is set out on the tariff, and the fee is handed to your companion in person when she arrives, at the figure already written into the thread, so that nothing about it follows you into the restaurant.

How she arrives matters here as much as anywhere. At a hotel bar the simplest arrangement is for you to be there first, with a seat kept beside you, and to let her find you; the reasons are set out in the letter on arrivals.

Choosing who to spend it with

Almost anybody in the circle is good company for an hour at a bar, but some women are better than others at the particular skill of carrying a conversation from a bar stool to a dining chair without letting it drop. Among the brunettes, Liana is the one I think of first. She likes large rooms and late dinners, speaks a precise and rather formal English, and has never once been seen to hurry. Tina is quicker and funnier, and she takes kitchens seriously enough to hold an opinion about the restaurant before you have reached its door.

Nancy, golden blonde and in her thirties, lives fifteen minutes from the square and treats it very nearly as her own; she has a corner table she returns to and a habit of walking through the garden afterwards. For a guest who would rather the dinner were the main event, Molly is serious about the plate and makes no apology for it, and an hour at a bar with her tends to be spent deciding what the two of you are going to order.

And after the table

An evening that began an hour early also tends to end well, because nobody has spent the dinner catching up. The walk back through the square is part of it. Its plane trees were planted in the late eighteenth century and are among the oldest in central London, and after eleven the square is lit, quiet and very nearly empty, which is a pleasant place to walk with somebody you have spent three hours getting to know.

If the evening wants to go on, it can, wherever the day book allows: I rewrite it at the next length on the tariff while it is still going, and nobody has to leave the table to arrange it. If it does not, the hour before the table will still have done its work, which is to make sure the dinner was the good part of the evening rather than the part spent getting ready for it.