As we limp through February towards the warmer months, one particular dining hurdle we’ve cleared is the pressure to dine romantically. Mid-February brings a yearly glut of “restaurants for romance”: places with views, places with booths, places with plastic indoor floral displays and places serving a special Valentine’s set menu with asti spumante and a helium balloon. None of these things makes my heart beat, but I’ll tell you what does: acoustic absorption. This, to me, is the sexiest phrase in the modern restaurant landscape, so when someone told me that the Dover, a New York-style Italian restaurant on Mayfair’s Dover Street, was a place one could hear and be heard, it was duly noted. Having now been, I can attest this is true: velvet curtains, wood panelling and not one but two tablecloths on each cover make every table feel like its own private island, where diners can hear their friends and, crucially, be unheard by other tables. This is gold dust. Privacy is romantic. Oh, and so is good lighting.
The Dover, a restaurant by former Soho House chief Martin Kuczmarski, has been said to be styled on Sophia Loren in the 1970s, which is another sexy phrase. Loren would look wonderful sitting in this gorgeously lit room, where each lightbulb is chosen to give your skin a radiant, just-stepped-off-a-film-set glow. The place isn’t candlelit, but it feels as if it is. It’s not often one feels sophisticated when ordering an Italian sausage pie or a hamburger, but this is one of those times.
