Everyone has a table. Most never sit down twice.

You answer twelve questions, a person reads them, and you get seated with five others at one venue on one night of the week. You book the nights you want. Keep taking the same table and the room starts to know you; hand a seat back and somebody on the waitlist takes it.

Every seat is tied to a real account with a name, a city and a date of birth behind it, and every table runs at a partner venue with staff in the room. Nobody at your table gets your address or your phone number. If a night goes wrong, tell us and that person does not sit at your table again.

Five other members of your city, picked by a person rather than a similarity score. We seat around the things that decide whether an evening works: how you like a room, what an evening costs you, which language you want it to run in. Not a checklist of hobbies.

Tell us once when you sign up and the kitchen knows before you arrive. Vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, halal, kosher and every allergy you list travel with your seat to every table. There is a line for the things a checkbox cannot say, like how severe something is or what to swap it for.

Give the seat back from your table page and somebody on the waitlist takes it. Do it at least 48 hours before the sitting and nothing happens. Do it later than that, or simply not turn up, and it counts as a strike, because five people held a table for you.

Real restaurants, wine bars and coffee counters in your city, in the districts you already eat in. You get the venue, the district and the full address once your table is set, and the room stays the same one, which is rather the point.

Eighteen and over, with no upper limit. Most tables land somewhere between the late twenties and the mid forties, though the Morning Table runs older and Counter Seats younger. We seat for how a night goes, not for a year of birth.

Everyone does. That is the whole design. Nobody arrives as a pair, nobody has a head start, and by the third week you have stopped introducing yourself.

Claim a seat, pick your city, answer the questions. If your city is live you are seated at the next table that fits you. If it is not live yet you go on the waitlist and we write the week it opens. Seats open on the 1st of each month.

The seat, the matching and every format we run, on all three plans. Food and drink are paid at the venue at menu price and we never mark them up. The membership was never the bill. The food is.