A work evening: company at a table full of colleagues
Client dinners, receptions, conference evenings and the long industry sit down where everyone brings someone. This is the heading for an evening with other people at the table, and it is a different job from an evening for two. She is arriving into a room that already has its own weather, and her work is to be interesting, easy to introduce and entirely uninterested in your business.
Three hours at £700 covers a dinner with speeches in it. Four hours at £900 covers a reception, a dinner and whatever happens at the bar afterwards. Most of these evenings land in the City of London or Canary Wharf, and the women who do them well are obvious once you read the register properly.
The briefing, which is the whole of the preparation
Tell the desk who is at the table, roughly what they do, how formal the room is and what you would rather not have discussed. Three sentences is enough. Cordelia passes it on in full, and the companion arrives knowing the shape of the evening instead of assembling it from clues between the first and second course.
How she is introduced
However you would like, and it is worth deciding before you arrive rather than in the doorway. Most guests use a first name and nothing more, which is both true and unremarkable, and nobody at a business dinner has ever pressed further. She will follow whatever line you set and will not improvise around it.
What she will not do is discuss the booking, the desk or anything about how the evening came to exist. Discretion here is not a promise on a page, it is simply the job, and the women on this list have been doing it long enough that it no longer requires thought.
Dress, and reading the room
Say what the room is and she will dress to it. A panelled dining room, a rooftop reception and a conference hotel ballroom want three different things, and getting it wrong is the one mistake that is visible from across a table. If there is a dress code printed on the invitation, send the wording rather than your summary of it.
What she is good at once she sits down
Getting the quiet one at the end of the table talking. Asking a question that makes a stranger sound more interesting than he expected to be. Knowing the exact moment a dinner should move on, and moving it. These are real skills and they are not distributed evenly, which is why this page names four women rather than shrugging and offering everyone.
Notice, and the nights everyone wants
Conference weeks and the two or three evenings in the year when every firm in London holds its dinner are the exception to everything else on this site. Those want booking as soon as the date is in your own diary. An ordinary Tuesday client dinner can usually be arranged the same afternoon, and the desk will say plainly which of the two your date is.
Four names for a table of colleagues
Violetta is unbothered by a grand room and holds a table without raising her voice. Stacy is calmer than she looks and keeps a clear head at midnight, which matters at the end of a long evening. Michelle is the best on the register at making strangers like one another. Samanta is completely at home in a room full of bankers and says so herself.
After the dinner ends
Most of these evenings have a second half that nobody plans for, which is the hour at the bar once the table breaks up. Book for it. Three hours that end the moment the speeches finish leave you standing in a lobby doing arithmetic, and the fourth hour at £900 is the one that makes the evening feel like an evening rather than an obligation.
If the night genuinely ends when the dinner does, she leaves at the hour in the confirmation without any performance about it. She will say goodnight to the table as naturally as she said hello to it, and nobody in the room will register anything at all, which is the entire point of booking a woman who has done this before.
The figure, and who sees it
Nobody at the table. The fee reaches her in person before the evening begins, away from the room and away from anyone in it, and there is nothing to settle at the end of the night. The desk issues no paperwork beyond the written confirmation, which stays in your own messages and names the companion, the hour, the length and the figure.
Every length is printed on the rates page and none of them moves for a corporate booking. Three hours is £700 whether the table holds two people or twelve.
Two notes worth reading first
Other arrangements
One line is enough
Write the district, the hour and the number of hours. What comes back has a name in it, a time in it and a figure in it, and nothing moves after that.