Delphine

Delphine is twenty-eight, she runs the floor of a forty-cover room in the 2nd, and she is invented: the name, the restaurant, the nights described here. Nobody real stands behind any of it.

The job on paper is the plan of the room, the book, and the timing of twelve tables against what one kitchen can physically send. The job as she does it is the temperature. A four-top arrives twenty minutes late, furious with the traffic on rue Réaumur and quietly furious with each other, and they are laughing before the coats are off. It happens most nights. Nobody on the staff has worked out the mechanism, and they have watched, because the ones who copy it get the volume and none of the effect.

Nothing about it is aimed. She comes at a table from the side with the wine list held like something she forgot she was carrying, and the party relaxes roughly two seconds before any of them decides to. Twenty-eight is young for the floor of a room like that, and it took about a month for the regulars to stop asking for whoever was in charge.

Tuesdays are the ones she likes: half full, the same eleven faces, service over by half eleven. Thursdays the room goes at a quarter past nine and stays gone. Saturdays are two sittings and she is tall enough to read the whole floor from the pass without moving, which is the only advantage she will admit to. Mondays she is off, and she is on rue du Nil by ten in the morning buying things she has no plan for.

She is quick in the way that gets people into trouble. The joke arrives before the thought that should have stopped it, mostly at her own expense, occasionally not, and she has an excellent record of landing it and a real one of the other thing.

Because the warmth runs at one setting and has no dimmer on it, the people who live with her get precisely what table nine gets, and have stopped trying to establish which of them is the guest. She would be genuinely wounded to read that, for about a day.

What we invent, what we generate and what we will not publish is in our editorial standards. How readers end up ordering a cast of people who do not exist is in the World Class 100 method.