The man's view

So what makes a restaurant good for an affair? John Sutherland has his very own grading system.

How should the investigative connoisseur grade the affair(e)-restaurant? What symbols of achievement would work for the various establishments? Stars won't do it - too Michelin (and, hovering over that, the image of Monsieur six rubber bellies. Very unaphrodisiac). Little coqs (rampant), perhaps, or - if one's feeling particularly roguish, condoms (erect). Le Guide Condomique? Might work.

It will have to be Gallic-flavoured, of course. Where sex meets food, one country rules. The key loan words tell their own story - affaire and restaurant. French is the language of gastro-naughty.

A knee-trembler round the back after a greasy at the local burger-joint is not what we're thinking of here. A man feels many things in a good restaurant. Most of all, in this egalitarian age, he feels manly ('the bill, waiter; and be quick about it'). And, in his heart, an Englishman also feels a little bit French, with all the cosmopolitan sophistication that our neighbours (in myth, at least) bring to illicit courtship. Myself, I find it hard sometimes, not to slip into Clouseau-ism, to separate the Anglo from the Frog in something like 'steak poivre'. That last word sinks down in the throat to Charles Boyeresque, baritone. Seductive, as I like to think.

Recall that iconic exchange between Vince and Jules in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction:

Vincent: 'You know what the funniest thing about Europe is?'

Jules: 'What?'

Vincent: 'It's the little differences ... You know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Paris?'

Jules: 'They don't call it a quarter pounder with cheese?'

Vincent: 'No, they got the metric system there. They wouldn't know what the fuck a quarter pounder is. They call it a Royale with cheese.'

The French can even make 99 cent scoff sound like seduction-food. Morgan Spurlock should be so lucky.

From personal observation (I am - as the novelist David Lodge likes to protest, when describing adultery - the war correspondent here, not the combatant) I would say the restaurant in my home town, London, which rates a maximal quatre coqs is Le Caprice ('The Careless Whim' - doesn't work in English, does it?). It's hidden down a side street in St James's - London's clubland. It, too, is exclusive. No walk-in trade. It's expensive. I've usually eaten there as the guest. Le Caprice is at least one zero above my pay grade.

Last time I was there was with Tom Maschler (a name that, thanks to Fay Maschler, his ex-wife and the restaurant critic, gets a restaurant's attention). He paid. He was still smarting about the roasting his autobiography had got. I had written probably the only friendly(ish) review in literary London (The Observer was hideously cruel). There's a good story about Maschler in Jeremy Lewis's biography of Allen Lane, King Penguin. A young meteor at the firm in the 1960s, Tom (cat) loudly interrupted a board meeting to take a phone call from his current popsy, and arrange lunch (and who knows what after) with her. Lane, who nervously kept his mistress well out of the public eye, was appalled. Was this what publishing had come to?

Tom, of course, had no designs on me. But the chat and charm oozed out instinctively. Force of habit. 'They always take my booking - however short the notice. Usually you have to wait three weeks ... I do recommend the crôute-aux-tomates [think toad-in-the-hole with toms], they make it up specially for me - you won't find it on the menu.'

If I'd been 40 years younger, transgendered and beautiful, my knees would have gone just that little bit rubbery under the barrage. How many arenas, nowadays, are there where a fellow can fully exercise his powers of charm? I watched, wondered, and learned.

Affair-restaurants put the adult into adultery and the fun into fornication. And the guy into the driving seat. There's an advertisement currently on TV for state-of-the-art disposable contact lenses. It's montage narrative, wittily understated. Scene one shows cute young executive on a train with hunky colleague. They're in first class, brainstorming amid a mess of business paper and humming laptops. Scene two, they're working late at the office. There's a hint of five-o'clock on his chin and her fragrance must be working overtime. Why can't they make out? There is, it emerges, a fly in the ointment. Her red rims. He tells her about the contact lenses he uses. Scene three: he's whisking her off to a restaurant. The viewer is left to fill in the next two scenes. Scene four: the quatre coqs. Scene five: two sets of contact lenses bathing post-coitally in their Renu saline solution. In the restaurant, young Mr Four Eyes (but you'd never guess) would have been Alpha Male and little Ms Rubberlegs the submissive female. Nowadays, the only place where a man can strut, chauvinistically, is the good restaurant. 'May I take your order, sir? The flunkey exists to serve you. In America, the restaurant is the only place where the ordinary citizen of that proud democracy routinely has a valet (think restaurant parking). A man walks taller. Aristocratically, almost. Monseigneur in his coach.

From my observation, there follow nine practical commandments for naughty-noshery (no seventh commandment - work it out).

1. Beware of sod's law. If you choose a restaurant within a three-mile radius of your place of work, it's water-cooler gossip before the day's out. My favourite restaurant in my home-from-home town, Los Angeles, is Citrus, on Melrose. It's harder to find than a brothel in the Vatican City. You drive by it three times before you spot it. That's the kind of establishment to go for (though you'll need a mortgage to pay the bill) - out-of-sight expensive.

2. Following on the above prudential strategy, make up a list of restaurants with high-wall leather booths. They make for an atmosphere of intimate, padded privacy in which conversational liberties can be safely taken. Or even an under-the-table fumble.

3. Affairs tend to progress through the discovery of a favourite new restaurant (recall Greene's The End of the Affair). Tip generously from the first. You want to be fondly remembered and always given your table. Leave cash on the table (not on the card receipt) so she knows what an open-handed fellow you are (there's no Dutch in your soul - Frog through and through).

4. If you're a budget-price (let's be honest, 'cheap') cove, avoid Italian restaurants. They love clatter. And a splodge of bolognese on the shirt is a real passion killer. Indian restaurants are quiet (all that sound-absorbing flock wallpaper) but those dreary raga-loops (Punjabi girls wailing glumly about their lovers) are a downer. Indian waiters are also rather censorious and prone to the chilling side glance. Chinese restaurants serve too fast and are obviously interested only in the foreign devils' money. Thai restaurants tend to have such exquisite waiters that you feel Shrek-like. Not good. American themed beef joints have heavy-pumping Muzak. Go French if you can afford it.

5. Following on the above, remember it's the conversation that gets the relationship fizzing. So even if it's French, you don't want one of those nouvelle cuisine places with course after course that demands a running commentary on the grub. You're a philanderer, remember, not a food critic.

6. The best (budget-priced) conversation restaurants in London are those on top of Waterstone's in Piccadilly and the NPG in Trafalgar Square. Sumptuous views, incredibly dilatory service, dirt cheap, and surrounded by thousands of objects that raise the cultural tone well above what you have on your mind.

7. See the book of Deuteronomy.

8. Make a list of restaurants with good conversation pieces around the table. L'Etoile in Charlotte Street, London, for example (cinq coqs), has faded photographs of French celebrities covering its walls. Do a reconnaissance meal first, and bone up on who's who ('My God, Moreau was beautiful, wasn't she?').

9. Avoid lettuce and spinach (green-tooth curse), garlic, and coarse vin rouge (black-tooth curse).

10. Have a discreet snack before the meal to dampen the ravening appetite. You want it to be evident that you're more interested in her than the food. In Las Vegas, the police recommend that (male) punters masturbate before going out on the town. Think about it - you want to appear cool and collected, not hot and sweaty. Just a suggestion.

Happy hunting and good eating.

The woman's view

But what's food got to do with it, says Stephanie Merritt. Surely eating is the last thing on our minds.

I was having lunch with a friend a couple of weeks ago, tucked into one of the bar tables in Sheekey's in London, when I realised that she wasn't listening to a word I was saying; instead, her attention was consumed by the couple on the next table but one. 'Affair!' she hissed with delight; naturally I shifted my chair, and the rest of our meal was spent watching our neighbours. She appeared to be in her forties, he a little older, and it was only the physical obstacle of the table between them that was preventing her from straddling him there and then. She was rapt at his every word, her head thrown back in too-loud laughter at his jokes (to be fair, they might have been very good jokes, I couldn't hear); he was more contained, but kept up a constant unbroken physical contact with her, touching her arm, her hand, reaching to tuck a stray curl away from her face. She wore a wedding ring, he didn't, but they were so clearly dying to maul each other that they couldn't possibly have been married to each other.

My friend and I, both of us writers of drama, gleefully invented a history for them: they looked - he in his suit and she in her expensive black top and skirt - as if they had, at some point that day, been in a work environment. What with all the touching and the bottle of wine, they also looked as if they didn't have much intention of returning. They asked for the bill and we heard him say to her, 'How long have you got?' My friend and I almost high-fived. Eventually they left - for a hotel, we wondered - either way, it was clear that their lunch had merely been a prelude. In fact, she'd left most of hers.

Restaurants are intrinsic to illicit affairs. While hotels are anonymous - a room you run to and from to hide yourselves from the world - restaurants are deliberately public. Although affairs, especially at the beginning, are all about animal passions, and wanting to rip someone's clothes off with your teeth the minute you see them, or perhaps because the force of desire can be so overwhelming, we like to dress them up with a veneer of civilisation. We may have set aside the afternoon to rut ourselves senseless with someone we ought not to be with, but we still want to preface it with lunch and conversation in a nice restaurant. Perhaps we like to do this because it gives us a sense of decorum, or normality; perhaps it's because it allows us to believe that the other person also enjoys our company with our clothes on; perhaps there is also the added thrill of being spotted.

But the affair restaurant needs to be carefully chosen. In the first heady rush of any new relationship, you want to show off your beau and feel that he is also proud to be seen out with you, but you also want to be furtive; you want to feel that the restaurants he takes you to reflect the esteem in which he holds you (and, crucially, that they are as good, if not better than, the restaurants he goes to with his wife). You don't want, for example, to be taken to the cafe of a garden centre near Grantham, as I once was, because it was 'handy' and he thought it unlikely we'd run into anyone we knew; whatever romantic comedy value it had as a concept soon paled in the face of an armoured jacket potato and queuing for the bathroom behind a minibus load of old ladies.

You might argue that the quality of the food is irrelevant - if it's only a warm-up to the main show, the meal is a prop and excitement will have muted your appetite anyway. If the restaurant meeting is an end in itself, a snatched hour in the company of your lover before you both have to return to your own lives, you'll be too busy talking and touching and gazing to have much concern for food. But the choice of food can be significant. 'Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions?' asks Maurice Bendrix in Graham Greene's The End of The Affair, of his first meal with Sarah Miles. Who would eat a dish of onions with someone they're hoping to get it on with? I remember thinking the first time I read it, but it's a strategy on Sarah's part - her husband hates the smell of onions, so he won't try to kiss her when she gets home. Bendrix, on the other hand, is not bothered by the onions; he continues, 'We left half the good steak on our plates and a third of the bottle of claret and came out into Maiden Lane with the same intention in both our minds.'

But it goes without saying that the most important factor in the choice of affair restaurant is discretion. Is it conducive to secrecy? Is it wood-panelled and dimly lit, with cosy little booths where you can snuggle down without being noticed? Do the waiters retire gracefully into the background with nothing more than a knowing raise of the eyebrow? And above all, is it the kind of place where anyone you know is likely to go?

The search for a restaurant unlikely to be frequented by someone who might recognise you, can lead to more adventurous and far-flung choices of eatery than you might otherwise attempt, but be warned; one of the immutable Newtonian laws is that, even if you stage your trysts in a pub on a remote Scottish island that can only be reached by trawler every second Thursday, you are guaranteed to be spotted by someone. A friend of a friend was once in New York with someone she should not have been in New York with; on the first night they sat outside a friendly Italian restaurant in the Village, so giddy with the excitement of being together openly as they would never have dared in London that they paid no attention to the handsome blond couple walking towards them, until handsome blond couple paused by their table and the male half cried, 'Hey! What are you doing here?' The story is given extra piquancy by the fact that the handsome blond couple in question were Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, so that the illicit lovers had to spend the rest of the week fretting about whether they might have just been cameo parts in a pap photo ('Chris and Gwynnie chat to friends') which might even now be circulating the offices of Heat magazine.

Think of poor Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter; though they meet in the railway tea-room (one step up from a garden centre), their relationship would never have got past polite greetings had he not one day walked into her usual lunch restaurant to find the only free seat in the place at her table. A couple of weeks later, bolder, they go for lunch at a grander restaurant and share a bottle of champagne; as he goes to fetch his coat, Celia Johnson is hailed by two women, who have been watching them all through lunch, and tries ineptly to pretend that Howard is a friend of the family.

She was underprepared, of course; it's wise to have your alibi ready for the moment of getting spotted before it happens. I was once taken to the Old Parsonage, a beautiful restaurant in Oxford, by a dashing academic from Cambridge; we sat at a table outside and at one point he went in to the bathroom and never came back. Our food arrived, so I went to see what had happened and found him seated inside with a group of men of his age and a whole new meal; he caught my eye and managed to convey the importance of the charade, so I breezed straight on by to the bathroom, then went back outside, ate my lunch and waited for him to leave with them, walk round the block and rejoin me for his second lunch. He hadn't banked on finding a posse of his colleagues in town, but we'd successfully passed the whole thing off in the manner of a Michael Frayn farce, largely thanks to the discretion of the waiter. It did give us a good anecdote, albeit one we couldn't tell anyone.

My favourite affair restaurant was a tapas bar in Chelsea. We would go there very late at night as an epilogue to the evening; if they'd closed the kitchen they would give us cheeses and olives and different wines to try on the house. It wouldn't suit everyone - the owner always wanted to chat to us in Spanish, which meant that we didn't get much chance to talk to each other, but my memories of it preserve those tastes, the cold clear wine and the delicious post-coital exhaustion, his smile, my rusty Spanish, as a picture I treasure. I haven't been back since, and I'm not sure that I would. As Bendrix and Sarah find out, a restaurant, particularly during a secretive affair, can become synonymous with a person, and, as is usually the case with affairs, at some stage has to be left behind.

Is there a perfect restaurant for an affair?

The foodie insiders' guide

Marco Pierre White, restaurateur
'That's a very impertinent question. You're very rude. I wouldn't recommend a place to anybody.'

Fay Maschler, Evening Standard restaurant critic
'Thinking back to when I had affairs, which restaurant to go to seemed immaterial. The physiological effect of illicit romance is like speed. Metabolism revs up, weight drops off, food can be pushed around the plate and the riveting aperçus of the new found idol drunk to the last drop. Ghastly establishments - Chittagong Charlie is one I remember - become a shared joke. When last this happened to me (reader I married him) I was working with Terence Conran on a restaurant guide (I assessed the food we ate). All I remember Terence saying is "but you've got so thin". He's never said it again. My two tips for places where you are unlikely to be seen, are Trader Vic's at the Hilton Hotel and Calabash at the Africa Centre, London.'

Jan Moir, Daily Telegraph restaurant critic
'Le Poule au Pot always wins awards as London's most romantic restaurant and it certainly has enough dark corners for an orgy. The only drawback is that so many other lovers have the same idea: Adam Boulton [Sky News political editor] and Anji Hunter [former aide to Blair] were spotted spooning among the steak knives before their wedding made them a boring legit couple. So my advice is get out of town if you can and head straight for Il Clandestino, a tiny, fabulous restaurant on Italy's Adriatic coast. As the sun goes down, warm up with a glass of rum, the home-made tiramisu and each other. Clandestino by name, clandestine by nature. No one will ever find you here ....oh no, here come Adam and Anji!'

Jean-Christophe Novelli, chef
'I would recommend a place but unfortunately I've never had an affair. However, if I was trying to impress, I'd go to Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, Oxfordshire or the Grove, Hertfortshire.'

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, food writer
'It's the sort of thing that one wouldn't, and shouldn't, reveal.'

OFM's top affair restaurant scenes

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Sometimes the place doesn't matter ...

'At 11 o'clock I was sitting in the third booth on the right-hand side as you go in from the dining room annexe ...The old bar waiter came by and glanced softly at my weak Scotch and water. I shook my head and he bobbed his white thatch, and right then a dream walked in. It seemed to me for an instant that there was no sound in the bar, that the sharpies stopped sharping and the drunk on the stool stopped burbling away, and it was like just after the conductor taps on his music stand and raises his arms and hold them poised ... I stared. She caught me staring. She lifted her glance half and inch and I wasn't there any more. But wherever I was I was holding my breath.'
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

And sometimes it is the food ...

'Afterwards - we were back at Rules and they had just fetched our steaks - she said, 'There was one scene you did write.'

'About the onions?'

'Yes.' And at that very moment a dish of onions was put on the table. I said to her - it hadn't even crossed my mind that evening to desire her - 'And does Henry mind onions?'

'Yes. He can't bear them. Do you like them?'

'Yes.' She helped me to them and then helped herself. Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions - it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable. I put my hand under the cloth and laid it on her knee, and her hand came down and held mine in place. I said, 'It's a good steak", and heard like poetry her reply, "It's the best I've ever eaten"."

· From The End of the Affair by Graham Greene