The suite dinner: a restaurant for two, one lift ride above the lobby

Why the best table in the hotel is upstairs

Downstairs, a hotel restaurant has a last sitting, a room full of neighbours and a waiter who would quite like the table back by eleven. Upstairs there is none of that. A suite dinner keeps every good part of a restaurant, the linen, the courses, the wine poured at the right moment, and drops the parts that make a private evening feel public. Nobody at the next table hears the story you save for the second glass, and nobody has to cross a lobby at the end of it.

It is also the most hotel shaped evening on the ladder. You never leave the building, she arrives once, and the kitchen does all the travelling. After a day of back to back meetings, or eleven hours in an aircraft seat, that is the whole appeal: dinner comes to the room, at your pace, and the night stays exactly as quiet as you want it.

Reading a suite plan for the table

The word suite covers a lot of floor plans in London, and not all of them can hold a dinner. A junior suite is usually one large room with a sofa at one end, which means eating at a coffee table or a writing desk. What you want is a one bedroom suite or larger, with a separate sitting room and, ideally, a dining table that seats four. Two people at a table for four have room for plates, glasses, a bottle and their elbows. Two people at a table for two are eating off a tray.

Put three plain questions to reservations before you commit. Is there a dining table in the sitting room, and how many does it seat? Can it be moved to the window? Is there a door between the sitting room and the bedroom? Three yeses and the room will work as a restaurant. Hotel photographs tend to show the bed, so ask for the floor plan instead; most grand houses will send one on request.

Four rooms the rota knows for dining in

A few London houses make a quiet speciality of the dinner that never goes downstairs. None of them has any arrangement with the desk, and menus and room rates are theirs to quote.

Ordering in courses, not on one trolley

The single thing that turns room service into dinner is timing. Left to its own habits, an in-room dining team sends everything at once, starters and mains under silver domes on one trolley with the pudding sweating beside them. Ask instead for the courses to come up separately. Order the whole meal in advance, around seven, and tell the kitchen to send the first course at a fixed time and hold the rest until you ring down. Five star kitchens are well used to working this way; they simply need to be asked.

Pick dishes that can make the journey from the pass to your door. A soufflé that must be eaten two minutes out of the oven will not survive a lift and a corridor, while a terrine, a piece of fish, a roast, a cheese board or a tart all arrive as the chef intended. Order the wine from the same list the restaurant uses and ask for the bottle to come up first, so it has time to open while you wait for her knock. Bringing your own bottle is usually possible too; ask what the hotel charges to open it before you do.

Laying the room like a restaurant

A few minutes before she arrives, the suite has to stop looking like an office. Close the laptop and put it in a drawer. Clear the chargers, the lanyard and the boarding passes off the table. Ask whoever brings the wine to lay the table at the window with proper glasses and linen. Lamps only, turned low; most hotels will not allow a lit candle in a room, and a lamp on its softest setting does the same work without troubling a smoke alarm. Music quietly, if at all. Then close the bedroom door. The sitting room is a restaurant tonight, and restaurants do not have beds in them.

Dress for a good dining room, because she will. Tell the desk the evening is a suite dinner and she chooses accordingly, a dress that suits a laid table rather than a dance floor. A jacket is optional in your own sitting room. Shoes are not, and neither is a shirt that has not spent the day on a plane.

Four hours, set out like a menu

The suite dinner is the four hour length on the ladder, £900, and those hours fall naturally into the shape of a meal.

Who to invite upstairs

Bianka is the natural first name for a suite dinner. She cooks from memory, can talk a sauce through like a sommelier talks through a vintage, and will have an opinion on your order before the first course is out of the lift. Samanta keeps a private list of London's finest hotel interiors and will know within a minute whether your suite was designed by someone who cared, which makes her perfect for a room booked for its view. Lea notices fabrics, chairs and the one lamp that flatters everyone, so ask her where the table should stand.

Bianka is one of the curvaceous companions, Samanta one of the slim and slender ones, and Lea wears the auburn waves that suit lamplight. If the talk is still flowing at eleven, say so before the fourth hour begins; when her diary allows, the booking steps up and you pay only the difference shown on the rates page. To start, send the hotel, the suite and the hour to the booking desk, and mention that the table is already ordered.