The sole, the spoon and the waiter: the safest order at a first dinner

A plain fish with a long reputation

Dover sole is a flat fish of the Channel and the North Sea, long and narrow and brown on its upper side, and it is one of the few fish that are almost always better served simply. The name is usually traced to the port of Dover, which for centuries sent the catch up to the London markets. Its flesh is firm, white and faintly sweet, and it holds together on the bone as softer fish do not, which is why it can be cooked whole and carried to the table intact.

There are two classic ways with it, and the older kitchens of Mayfair keep both. Grilled on the bone, it arrives with butter and lemon and nothing else of consequence. Cooked meunière, it is dusted with flour, fried gently in butter and finished with more butter taken to a nut brown, a squeeze of lemon and a little parsley. Cooks have long held that the fish is better a day or two after landing than straight off the boat, since the flesh firms as it rests, and it is one of the few things on a fish menu that genuinely rewards a kitchen's patience.

What happens beside the table

The fish comes out of the kitchen whole, and the waiter takes it apart at a small side table within arm's reach of you. With a fish knife and a spoon he clears the fringe of small bones along each edge, runs the blade down the line of the spine, and lifts the upper fillets away in two clean pieces. The skeleton comes out in a single movement, the lower fillets are turned onto a warmed plate, and the butter from the dish is spooned back over them. Done properly it takes two or three minutes and leaves nothing on the plate but fish.

It is worth watching, and it tells you more about a dining room than the menu can. It means the room still employs waiters trained to carve and fillet, a skill that takes a long time to teach. It means the kitchen trusts the floor with its best fish. And it means the tables stand far enough apart for a waiter to work between them, which is another way of saying that the room was designed for conversation rather than for as many covers as the floor will bear.

Where it is still done properly

Scott's on Mount Street is the obvious place to begin. It has been a fish restaurant since the middle of the nineteenth century and on Mount Street for more than fifty years, and its sole, grilled or meunière, is filleted at the table as a matter of course. It is one of the handsomest rooms in Mayfair, built around a long counter for shellfish, and it sits a short walk from Berkeley Square and Carlos Place. Angelika, who lives in the district, counts it as the one table she would choose over any other.

Across Piccadilly in St James's, Wiltons on Jermyn Street has been trading since 1742 and treats the sole as the heart of its menu. The panelling, the waiters who have been there for years and the sense that nothing has been altered without long thought make it the most traditional room of its kind in London, and it is an easy walk from Green Park and the lower end of Mayfair.

Several of the grill rooms in the older hotels still keep a side table and a waiter who knows how to use it. A quiet question when you reserve will tell you whether the sole is filleted in the room or in the kitchen. It is a perfectly fair thing to ask, and a good room will answer it plainly.

What it ought to cost, and why no figure appears here

Guests sometimes ask what a Dover sole ought to cost in Mayfair, and the honest answer is that I will not print a number, because it moves with the season, the landings and the size of the fish, and anything I wrote today would be wrong by the spring. What can be said is that it is usually among the dearer main courses on any menu where it appears, and that it deserves to be. A whole fish of proper size, cooked with care and filleted by hand, uses the most expensive thing in the kitchen and several minutes of a skilled waiter's full attention.

Some rooms price it by weight or give it at the market price of the day, which is simply a way of being truthful about a fish that varies. If a sole is offered at a figure that seems too kind, look closely at the name. Lemon sole is a different fish altogether, perfectly good and considerably cheaper, but softer and plainer, and it is not what anybody means by a Dover sole. Ask if the menu is vague; nobody in a serious dining room will think less of you for it.

Why it is the safest order at a first dinner

At a first dinner the food should never become the subject. A dish that needs dismantling, a shell that needs cracking or a sauce that travels makes you concentrate on your plate at exactly the moment you would rather concentrate on the person across from it. A sole filleted at the table carries none of these hazards. There are no bones to find, nothing to wrestle with, and it can be eaten with a fork in one hand while the other holds a glass.

It is also light enough to leave room for a pudding and for the rest of the evening, it sits well with almost any white wine the table settles on, and the filleting gives two people who have only just met something agreeable to watch together, which is a far better pause in a conversation than a silence. It is a dish that nobody regrets ordering, and at a first dinner that is precisely the recommendation you want.

Arranging the dinner itself

A dinner of this kind belongs to the long table: four hours at £900, long enough for a drink beforehand, a dinner at the room's own pace and the walk home afterwards. If you would rather open the evening at a bar before the table, the case for it is made in the letter on the hour before dinner. Every other length is on the tariff, and whichever you choose, the fee is handed to your companion in person as she arrives and is not mentioned again.

Among the blondes of the circle, Nancy is the companion I would send to a room like Scott's: calm, deliberate and fond of returning to the same corner table. Nora likes a long dinner and an early finish, which a fish supper suits very well. Angelika, mentioned above, is the other natural choice, and anybody else in the Salon can be arranged for the same table.