Dinner Dates: What to Expect and How to Book One

A dinner date is a longer booking built around going out rather than staying in. It is the most misjudged booking we take, usually because people treat it as a standard hour with a meal attached. It is not, and the difference is worth understanding before you book one.

How long it runs

Three hours is the usual minimum and most are booked longer. That is not padding: an hour of it disappears into the restaurant before anything else, and a dinner date that ends the moment the plates are cleared is an awkward evening for both of you.

Our rates for three hours typically run around eight hundred. Every profile lists its own, and our guide on what a booking costs covers how the longer durations price up.

Booking the restaurant

You book it, in your name, and tell us where. That matters for two reasons: she needs to know how to dress, and she needs to know the area to plan her evening around it.

Somewhere she can be comfortable is worth more than somewhere impressive. A quiet corner in a decent restaurant beats a famous one with tables eighteen inches apart.

If you are staying at a hotel and eating there, say so. It changes the shape of the evening and it is worth her knowing in advance.

Where to go

Mayfair and Marylebone between them hold most of the restaurants people book for this, and both have escorts based within a few minutes. Chelsea suits an evening that carries on somewhere afterwards. Our guide to the best areas in London goes through the character of each.

How to behave at the table

Like you would with anybody else. She is not there to be displayed, and the evening goes better if you talk to her rather than about her.

Order for yourself, not for her. Let her choose her own wine. Do not discuss the booking, the rate or anything about the arrangement where you can be overheard, which in most London restaurants is everywhere.

If a waiter assumes you are a couple, you are a couple. That is the whole point of the booking and correcting it helps nobody.

What to tell us when you book

• The restaurant and the reservation time
• Roughly how the evening runs afterwards, and where
• Any dress code, black tie or otherwise
• Whether anyone else will be at the table

That last one matters more than people expect. A dinner date with business colleagues present is a different booking from a dinner date for two, and she should know which she is walking into.

Afterwards

Settle the bill discreetly, as you would on any evening out. Her payment is handled at the start of the booking rather than at the end, in the usual way, and is not something to be revisited over coffee.

The dinner date rate sits on every profile beside the hourly one. Browse the roster, and read escort etiquette for the conventions that apply to any booking.