Wiltons, where the booths kept secrets long before anyone called it discretion

Wiltons dates its story to 1742, when a shellfish seller named George William Wilton set up near the Haymarket. It has moved several times since, always within a few streets of where it began, and it has been on Jermyn Street since the 1980s. Put plainly, it was feeding St James's before the word restaurant had settled into English, and some of its habits still predate the idea.

Discretion is one of those habits. The room was serving politicians, bankers and landowners long before anyone thought of discretion as something to advertise, and the staff behave as though it never needed a name. You are shown to your table, looked after beautifully and then left alone. Nobody hovers. Nobody comments on the company you keep, then or afterwards.

Inside, the tone is closer to a club than a restaurant. Booths line the walls, the linen is white and heavy, the light is kept low, and the service follows an older script: attentive, formal and entirely unhurried. Plates arrive when they are ready and not a moment before. Glasses are filled without a request and without a flourish.

Gentlemen are expected in a jacket, and a tie is never out of place; check the current rule when you book. Your companion will dress accordingly without needing to be told, in something tailored and quiet that looks at home against the booths. At Wiltons, the most elegant table in the room is usually the one nobody notices.

Wiltons cooks the British larder as it changes through the year, and ordering well here means knowing what the month has to offer.

A booth does three things for two people. It turns the room into a background, so that the conversation feels private without feeling hidden. It seats you side by side, or at a close angle, instead of facing each other over a wide expanse of linen, and that is warmer. And it removes the sense of being watched, because nobody can see much of a booth without making a point of looking.

Ask for one when you book, and ask early; they are the tables regulars prefer. If none is free, a table along the wall is the next best thing. The centre of the room is for people who wish to be seen, and on this kind of evening that is rarely you.

If it is your first visit, say so. A room this old enjoys a newcomer, and the staff will guide the order without making anyone feel tested.

Wiltons suits an early table better than a late one. A dinner begun at half past seven leaves the whole of Jermyn Street and St James's for afterwards, when the walking is at its best. For a first meeting, a drink at The Stafford's American Bar or at Dukes, both a few minutes away, lets you arrive at the booth already talking. Over four hours the shape falls naturally: forty minutes at a bar, two hours at the table, and the rest on the walk and the nightcap.

Wiltons sits on the most particular shopping street in London, and the street is part of the evening. Before dinner, walk it end to end. The shirtmakers keep their windows lit. Floris has sold scent from the same premises for close to three centuries. Paxton and Whitfield, the cheesemonger, perfumes the pavement outside its door. Halfway along, Beau Brummell stands in bronze by the entrance to Piccadilly Arcade, dressed, as he would have insisted, better than anyone passing.

After dinner the street is quiet by ten, its shutters down and its lamps doing all the work. A nightcap at Dukes is a short walk west, and St James's is at its most beautiful on the way, the clubs lit behind their windows and the traffic gone. For guests staying north of Piccadilly, Albemarle Street is barely ten minutes on foot.

Sonya counts Wiltons among her favourite rooms in London. She chooses one dish, takes her time over it and brings the calm of years at the barre to a formal room. Among our petite companions, she is the natural first suggestion for a long, quiet dinner.

Vanessa will insist on a detour into Floris first, where the assistants know her by now, and arrive at the table smelling faintly of fig. If you would rather a companion from our thirties list with more sunshine in her manner, Nancy turns an old-school room several degrees warmer.

Dinner at Wiltons fits the four hour luxury dinner at £1,800, with time for Jermyn Street before and a nightcap after. Octavia arranges the companion; the table is yours to book. Begin through booking.