The room at the back
Clos Maggiore sits on King Street, a couple of minutes west of the piazza in Covent Garden, behind a frontage that gives very little away. The rooms at the front are warm and fairly conventional. The room that people write to the desk about is behind them: a conservatory under a glass roof that opens on fine evenings, its walls and ceiling hung thickly with pale blossom and threaded with small lights, so that dinner feels as though it is being eaten under an orchard in April whatever the month outside.
It is frequently described as the most romantic dining room in London, and it has earned the description honestly. The cooking leans towards the French countryside, the wine list is one of the longest in the West End, and the service knows exactly what most of its tables are there for. Nobody here has any arrangement with this desk. It appears because guests ask for it more often than for any other table in WC2, and because a little knowledge makes it far easier to get.
Why it books out months ahead
The conservatory holds a limited number of tables, most of them for two, and a great many of those are booked by people planning a particular evening a long way in advance: anniversaries, birthdays, the night somebody intends to ask a question. Weekends in December and the middle of February go first, then Friday and Saturday evenings more generally, and by the time most visitors think of it the obvious dates have gone.
That is the honest picture, and it is worth knowing before you try. What it also means is that the room is full of people who planned their evening carefully, and plans made that far ahead are the ones most likely to change. Which is the opening.
Getting in at shorter notice
Flexibility is everything. A Tuesday or a Wednesday is very much easier than a Friday. An early sitting, before the theatre crowd arrives, or a late one, after it has left for the curtain, is easier than eight o'clock. A table for two is easier than a table for four. Ask for the conservatory by name, say that you would take any sitting in it, and ask to be told if something opens up. Plans made months ahead do change, and when they do, those tables come back.
The other route is simply to book the front room, which is often available when the conservatory is not, and to ask on arrival whether a table at the back has come free. Sometimes it has. If it has not, you are still eating the same cooking from the same kitchen, with the same wine list, a few metres further from the blossom.
The front room and a half past seven curtain
For a pre theatre dinner the conservatory is, if anything, the wrong room. It is designed for lingering. The light is low, the tables are close and quiet, and the whole atmosphere encourages a second glass and a pudding you had not planned on. It also sits at the far end of the restaurant from the street, so a quick exit means crossing the whole place. None of that matters at nine o'clock. At five to seven, with a curtain at half past, it matters a good deal.
A front room table at half past five, with the bill asked for at ten to seven, leaves a comfortable walk to any of the nearby houses: the Royal Opera House is about four minutes through the piazza, the Coliseum on St Martin's Lane about the same, and the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane a little further. Keep the conservatory for the evening when the dinner is the event rather than the prelude to one. For what happens when the curtain falls and the whole district tries to leave at once, the note on the quarter past ten spill is worth reading first.
The hour after the plates
King Street is well placed for the part of the evening that follows. The piazza is two minutes one way and quiet by eleven, the Strand three or four the other, and the hotels of WC2 are all within a short walk: WC2R 0EZ and WC2B 4BZ to the south and east, WC2N 4HX and WC2H 9HB to the west and north. A slow walk under the arcades of the piazza after dinner is as good a ten minutes as the district offers.
That is what the dinner booking is built around: four hours at £900, arranged backwards from the reservation, with the time after the table counted in rather than left to chance. For a shorter evening, three hours at £700 still leaves room for the walk.
Company for King Street
A room this deliberate suits company that can meet it halfway without taking it too seriously. Lea loves old dining rooms and older service, drinks her wine cold whatever the colour, and will enjoy the blossom without pretending not to. Patricia is still and attentive, with a calm that quietens a busy room, and her dry humour surfaces somewhere around the second course. Luna is the striking one, auburn red, and turns out to be very easy company once the evening has settled.
All three are on the auburn page of the index, which is the scarcest colouring on the list. Karolina, who lives in Covent Garden and goes to the ballet several times a season, is the companion to ask for when the dinner comes before a curtain, since she has never yet let a guest miss one.
Cross filed: most of the names in this piece also sit under auburn and red in the the index.