Michelle, companion in Chelsea

About Michelle

Michelle has the timing of a good host, which is to say she knows when to speak and when to let the table carry itself. She stands 173 cm, curvy, her long dark brown hair falling straight, her brown eyes holding a room without any effort. She dresses well and simply, a dress with a proper shape to it, a coat she has owned for years, heels she wears for the height rather than the label. In her late twenties, she is entirely comfortable being looked at and completely indifferent to it.

Her English is quick and warm, and she is the companion to book when other people will be present, because she makes strangers like each other. She asks the sort of questions that get a shy guest talking, and she has an instinct for the exact moment a dinner should move on. Away from a table she is softer and slower: she cooks, she swims at the Chelsea end of the river, and she is unembarrassed about preferring an early night to a late bar.

Her Chelsea is the King's Road end. The Cadogan Arms is where she starts a guest who wants somewhere handsome and unstuffy, the dining room upstairs, a table by the window, ten minutes from the SW3 hotels on foot. After dinner she takes the side streets down to Cheyne Walk, where the houses face the water and the traffic finally gives up. She lives in Chelsea, so she knows which corner shop is still open at midnight, which is the sort of thing that ends up mattering.

Her stretch of Chelsea, from the shops down to the water, is on that page. Put the night to booking and Cordelia comes back with her confirmed, and with a word on whether a table wants holding.

Booking her

If other guests are joining, tell the desk how many and Cordelia will confirm Michelle with that in the note, since she is at her most useful across a table of four. Bookings run from two hours, and she lives close enough to arrive on time whatever the traffic does.

Her figures are the same figures every companion here works to, printed on the rates page, and the order a booking runs in is on the booking page.

An evening with Michelle

Put her at a table with people she has never met and watch what happens. Within twenty minutes the two quiet ones are talking to each other and nobody has checked a phone. She does it without any obvious effort, mostly by asking one good question and then genuinely listening to the answer.

On a quieter evening she would rather it were just the two of you and a long dinner upstairs, followed by the walk to Cheyne Walk with the houseboats knocking against the wall. She will point out the house where the painter lived and tell you what he was like, which is not always flattering. Home by eleven suits her, and she says so plainly rather than yawning through a second bar.