The evening room only
Taking an evening table
Bookings are for the dining room, on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday evening. They are taken by email, at kitchen@pressmonmouth.live, and they are confirmed by a reply naming the sitting. Nothing is held until that reply has gone out, because the diary is one book and only one of us writes in it.
What to put in the email
Four things, and the fifth if it applies. Anything else is welcome but is not needed.
- The evening Which Thursday, Friday or Saturday. A date is better than “this Friday”, because we read the mail two days behind on a busy week.
- How many The number of people, not the number of tables. Four to a table is the room’s rule and we will work out the rest.
- Which sitting The quarter past six or the quarter past eight on a Friday or Saturday; on a Thursday there is only the half past six.
- A name and a way back Replying to your own message is enough, so a telephone number is optional rather than asked for.
- Anything you cannot eat Say it here rather than at the table if you can. It goes to whoever is cooking that week before the board is finalised, which is the only point at which it is easy to accommodate.
What comes back, and when
The mailbox is read twice: once before the door opens in the morning, and once after the stove is off at night. A reply goes out in one of those two windows, which means a message sent on a Friday at seven in the evening is answered that night, not during service.
The reply names three things: the evening, the sitting, and the time the table is held to. We hold a table for fifteen minutes past the sitting time; after that, on a Friday or Saturday, it may go to whoever is at the counter, because the second sitting is already on its way.
If the reply does not come within a day, the message has gone astray rather than been refused, and it is worth sending again. We have no booking line: the kitchen telephone is in the kitchen, and it is not answered while there is a pan on.
Changing or giving up a table
Reply to the same message. That keeps the whole history of the booking in one thread, which is how the diary is checked against the mailbox on a Wednesday.
Fewer or more people
tell us before the Wednesday if you can
Dropping from four to two is easy at any point. Going up is a question about the room, not about the kitchen: five or six means two tables joined and four places out of the room, so it needs to be known before the board is written on the Wednesday.
Moving to another evening
a new sitting, named in a new reply
Say which evening you would rather have and we will send a fresh confirmation naming the new sitting. The old one is struck out of the diary when the new reply goes, not before, so you are never left without a table in hand.
Giving the table back
the morning of the day is enough
Nothing is taken in advance, so there is nothing to return. A message by the morning of the day lets the table go to somebody else; later than that and it will most likely stand empty, which on five tables is a quarter of the room.
The counter takes no bookings at all
Through the day, Tuesday to Saturday, the front room and the unlaid room behind it are first come. There is no list and nothing is held, including for a party. If you are bringing six people to the counter at midday, it will work far better at half past eleven than at one, and that is the only advice we have.
Before writing about a long table, it is worth putting your own evening through the planner on the front page: it is the same sum we do in the diary, and it will tell you in advance whether the room can hold the number you have in mind.
What a sitting means here