Nobody in the room is taller, and nobody is quieter about it. At 178 cm Violetta is tall and slender. Long black hair, sleek and straight as a plumb line. Brown eyes, very hard to read at first. She arrives exactly on time and never mentions the weather. Her style is desert-gold glamour: a long column dress, gold cuffs, a single statement ring. She moves slowly, deliberately, and heads turn without her appearing to notice.
Mysterious, elegant and confident, she reveals herself in stages. The first surprise is her humour: dry, quick and often delivered with a completely straight face. She loves stand-up comedy and knows the best rooms in London, and her notebook of favourite jokes is longer than most people's address books. English is her language, spoken low and precisely. She swims every morning and reads constantly, and bookshops are her refuge, the smaller and stranger the better.
Her Aldgate evening begins at Libreria on Hanbury Street, the small Spitalfields bookshop where phones are discouraged and the shelves are arranged by theme rather than alphabet. She will find you a book you did not know you needed, having read most of the shelf already, which she will mention drily. From there Spitalfields is full of good restaurants, and she chooses the corner table every time. Dinner is long, candlelit and full of conversation, with the dry jokes arriving at exactly the right moment.
Violetta is abroad and returns on Friday 2 October. Dinner dates in Aldgate for any evening after that are accepted now through booking, and the dinner figure appears on rates.