Dinners that don't appear on any itinerary

There is a table, in a city we will not name, that seats nine. The cook is famous; the room is not. The address is, and we keep it this way, between us and the cook.

A class of dinner

We organise four kinds of dinners for members: the public reservation (rare; we usually only handle these because the member specifically asks for the famous room), the chef's table at a restaurant a step quieter, the private home dinner, and what we informally call the off-list — a dinner in a place that, on paper, doesn't serve the public.

The off-list, in particular

• A test kitchen used twice a year for a tasting menu.
• An apartment lent for a single night by a friend who happens to be a sommelier.
• A restaurant's upstairs, where the staff dinner is held — opened, on a quiet Tuesday, for our members.
• A wine cellar with a table at the back, and one cook.

A famous table will feed you well. A quiet one will tell you something you didn't know about a city.

How the conversation usually starts

A member writes that they'll be in Lisbon, or Tokyo, or Marrakech for three nights and would like to eat well one of those nights. The work begins from there. The first round of suggestions is almost never written down — it's a phone call, in part because we have to ask the cook first.

What we'll ask of you

1. How many — never more than ten, almost always between four and six.
2. A short note on diet, only the parts that matter.
3. A wine you have been thinking about, if there is one.
4. Whether the evening should run late, or end at midnight on the dot.

What we'll never do

1. Repeat the same dinner twice for the same member without telling them.
2. Photograph the food.
3. Use the cook's name in writing without permission.

A night, for example

In May last year, a member of ten years asked for a single quiet dinner in Paris. We arranged for the kitchen of a restaurant — closed Mondays — to be opened on a Monday for him and his wife. The cook prepared seven courses. There was no menu printed. Three bottles were drunk; one was a gift from a friend of the cook who happened to be in the room. The bill, as it should be, was a single number on a card.

The member still has not posted about it.

For members already known to us, the way to put a dinner on our calendar is the usual: a short note to your concierge, three weeks of warning if you can manage it, and one detail about the evening you can't live without.

There is a habit, in our trade, of using the word "exclusive" until it stops meaning anything. We've tried to keep ours small enough that it still does.