Dinner up the hill, four hours and a long table
North London eats late and it eats locally, which is the whole argument for a dinner date up here rather than in the middle of town. Nine o'clock is a normal hour to sit down on Upper Street and an early one on the Broadway at Muswell Hill. Nobody is turning tables and nothing is being performed. Four hours sounds like a great deal of dinner until you have spent one of them walking to the restaurant through a Georgian square and another still sitting there long after the plates have gone.
The dinner date is £900 for four hours and it is the line on the ladder this site was really built around. Inside it you get the hour before the table as well as the hour after it, which is where most of an evening actually happens. Reserve in your own name, send the desk the restaurant and the time, and she will be outside a few minutes early rather than a few minutes late.
Suited to dinner up the hill
Where a table is worth booking
Islington is a mile of high street with a theatre at each end and kitchens that consider nine the start of the evening rather than the end of it. The quieter half, away from the noisier end, is the half to ask for.
Up in Muswell Hill the Broadway eats early and talks late, so by nine you can have a whole corner of a room to yourselves, which is worth the honest hour it takes to get up there. Hampstead keeps village hours and closes earlier than either, so a table there wants a seven o'clock start instead of a nine.
The hour before the table
This is the part guests underestimate and the part the women here plan hardest. A drink somewhere with a door onto the street, twenty minutes through the rose beds while the light goes, an almost empty Georgian house full of Italian pictures: the point is to arrive at dinner with something to talk about that is not the journey. Say roughly when you would like to be sitting down and the desk builds backwards from there.
Who is at her best across a table
Milena will take you round a gallery for an hour and then ask what you saw, which is a harder question than it looks. Lucy reads a menu like a document, asks one question about the fish and orders the pie anyway. Margo can connect a planted border and a staged scene at length and make you glad she did. Lea will stop mid sentence for a view and pick the sentence back up at the bottom of the hill. Thea is soft and unhurried and very good at the last hour of a long meal.
How the four hours usually run
A drink at seven, a table at half eight, plates cleared by ten and nobody moving. The last hour is what makes the booking worth its figure: the talking has done its work, the room has thinned out, and the walk to wherever you are staying takes as long as it takes.
If the evening wants to be longer than four hours, say so early rather than in the last ten minutes, and she will tell you honestly whether the rest of her night allows it instead of guessing at it.
Booking the night
Send the date, the district and the restaurant if you have one, or ask and you will be told which rooms are quiet at nine. The morning of is usually notice enough, though a Saturday in the season wants a few days. Every length and figure sits on the rates page and the whole list carries the same one, so nothing shifts as you move between profiles. Two hours at £500 is the shorter version if four is more evening than you want.
Two sheets worth reading first
Dinner up the hill, in detail
Is £900 for four hours or for the meal?
For her four hours. Dinner itself is settled by you at the restaurant in the ordinary way, exactly as it would be on any other night out.
Should I book the table or should you?
You, in your own name, and then send the desk the room and the hour. She would far rather walk into a reservation that already exists than negotiate one at a door.
What if the restaurant runs late?
Then it runs late, and she is not going to spend the last course watching a clock. Extending is usually possible and always easier asked early.
Can dinner start somewhere else?
Often it should. A gallery, a park gate or a hotel bar first gives the table something to build on, and the desk will suggest one near wherever you are eating.
Is four hours too long for a first meeting?
Rarely, in a part of London where half the pleasure is the walk between places. If you would rather test it, two hours at £500 does much the same thing with less of the walking.
Other evenings we set up
The sign stays lit
Give the desk an hour and a street, and the rest of the night is arranged quietly, anywhere from the lock at Camden to the Broadway on the ridge.