One table behind a curtain of light, and whether to sit at it

The dining room at W1K 1QA

The hotel at W1K 1QA has faced Hyde Park from Park Lane since 1931, and it still does the long, gilded, deeply carpeted version of a grand hotel better than almost anywhere in London. Alain Ducasse opened inside it in 2007 and has held three Michelin stars since 2010, which in a city that changes its restaurants as often as London does is a long run of doing one thing extremely well.

The room itself is calm rather than grand: pale, softly lit, the tables set well apart, the service attentive in the French manner, which means you rarely see it arrive and never see it hover. Nothing about the room is loud. It is the sort of dining room in which a four hour dinner feels entirely natural, because the kitchen is plainly expecting you to take that long.

The table inside the light

In one part of the room stands the Table Lumière, a single table enclosed by a curtain of several thousand fibre optic strands that fall from ceiling to floor and glow softly around whoever sits inside. From within, the rest of the restaurant blurs into shapes and small points of light. From without, the table is the most noticeable thing in the room: a lit enclosure with people in it.

It is a private dining table in all but walls, meant for a small party, and it is reserved separately from the ordinary tables around it. Some hosts take it for two. Whether they should is the question this note is really about, and the answer depends far less on the table than on how well the two people at it already know each other.

When it is a pleasure

The table is at its best when everyone inside it is already at ease. A birthday, an anniversary, a dinner for four or six who have been looking forward to it for weeks: on evenings like those the curtain works exactly as intended, closing the party into its own small weather and letting the rest of the room fall away. The light is flattering, the sound is softened, and the feeling of having the most particular seat in a very good restaurant is simply enjoyable.

It also suits a second or third dinner with the same companion, when the first ten minutes are no longer something to be got through. By then there is a shared history, however short, and a table built for occasions has an occasion to hold.

When it is a stage

For a first evening it is usually a mistake. Two people who met twenty minutes ago are still finding each other's pace, and the Table Lumière puts that process on display. Every waiter who parts the curtain makes an entrance. Every diner on the way to the cloakroom glances in. Your companion will manage it gracefully, because managing rooms is part of what she does, but you will spend some of the evening aware of being looked at, and that is not what the evening was for.

The better choice for a first dinner is an ordinary table at the edge of the room, with a wall at your back and a view of the whole space. You still have the kitchen, the service and the stars. What you give up is the spectacle, and on a first evening the spectacle is the thing you least need. Keep the lit table for a return visit, when there is something to celebrate and someone you are glad to celebrate it with.

Holding the table and writing the message

Book the restaurant yourself, in your own name, and do it before you write to the house; the note on holding the table first explains why that order saves everybody time. The Table Lumière is one table, so it goes well ahead. An ordinary table is easier to find, but this is still a room people plan an evening around, and a Saturday is a very different matter from a Tuesday.

Then write to Tamsin for dinner at a held table. Four hours at £900 is the length this room wants; anything shorter asks the kitchen to hurry, which it will do politely and without enthusiasm. Say whether your companion should meet you downstairs, along the Promenade, or come up to your room first if you are staying in the hotel. She is handed the fee in person when she arrives, and after that it is not mentioned. It never goes through the restaurant or the front desk.

Company for a three star room

A long, quiet, formal dinner needs somebody who genuinely enjoys one. Two of the women best suited to it sit in the curvaceous drawer. Nancy knows this stretch of Park Lane as well as anybody on the list and has the unflustered calm of a woman who has sat in grand rooms often enough to stop noticing them. She is thirty, talks well, and asks proper questions. Luna is younger and more serious than her age suggests, notices everything, and regards a long dinner with no agenda as the best possible use of an evening.

For a guest who prefers fewer words, Danielle is precise, dry and comfortable with silence, which in a room this hushed is a real advantage. Longer evenings suit her particularly well, and four hours at this table is exactly the kind she means.

After the last course

Park Lane at eleven is wide and loud with traffic, and the park across it is dark and very large. Hyde Park stays open until midnight, and ten minutes along the edge of it is the right ending to four hours at a table, whatever sort of table it was. If the weather is against you, the hotel is full of places to sit, and a car can be brought to the door in the time it takes to find your coat.