The perfect time for dinner

A while ago, when I wrote about a restaurant booking service, I was picked up in the comments about my presumptions about the right time for an evening meal. I had blithely condemned 6.30pm as an eccentric time to eat dinner in a restaurant, but counted 7pm among the good slots. As @ihatesummer pointed out, there's only 30 minutes in it. But could they be the most significant 30 minutes in the restaurant-goer's schedule?

I must admit that, due to the demands of a small boy who likes to hit the hay on the dot of seven, dinner is "taken" at home at 6.15pm. But I'd never willingly book a table for that time; the idea of eating out before 7pm seems to me to be all kinds of wrong, just as starting at 9pm causes havoc with both digestion and babysitters.

The stretch between 5pm and 7pm is the time that no-one wants. They might only just have finished work, been on the Hobnobs all afternoon, or need to get a drink under their belts first. It is widely known that the great arts of theatre, cinema, opera and ballet were invented to sell restaurant seats during the early and late shifts - the only successful strategy developed so far. Lower prices, wine offers or set menus were also developed, but in vain; in all but the buzziest, urban, all-day places, there'll be tumbleweed rolling across the floor as the waiting team, smelling of fags, rehearse the specials and ignore the couple taking "advantage" of the Early Bird deal.

Consumption is, of course, a matter of science as well as pleasure. Many weight-loss regimes require followers to eat their "big" meal earlier in the day, to maximise the time available for the body to process it. Is there an optimal time for dinner? Dr Joan Ransley, honorary lecturer in human nutrition at the University of Leeds, says not. "Eating just before you go to bed does affect gastric emptying because you're lying down. But the most important thing to remember," she says, glancing briefly at my hair, "is that we are not lions on the Serengeti. We don't thrive on one huge meal, and then nothing. We need to eat roughly every four hours, so it really depends on when you had lunch."

Foreigners have their own ideas, as is their perfect right. I can find no definitive statistics on thedream dinner time for most Americans, but they have a reputation for eating out at a time when the rest of the civilised world would barely have digested lunch. In continental Europe, of course, things are terrifyingly different. The Frommer's guide to Spain reports that "the chic dining hour, even in one-donkey towns, is 10 or 10:30pm", whereas in Denmark, home of the zeitgeisty Sarah Lund, "farmer's hours", starting at 6.30pm, are kept. Frommer's, wisely, does not pronounce on English habits.

There are always extenuating circumstances. One of the reasons 6.30pm doesn't work for me is that I like to eat in a well-populated dining room. I'll go, lamblike, whenever (though not wherever, obviously) the majority does. This approach proved useless during a walking holiday in Spain. In the middle of Murcia, far from stopgap tapas and with an eight-mile walk in our legs and a limited supply of patatas fritas, waiting until the chic dining hour was impossible. We ended up the only 7.30pm diners in our lovely hotel which compassionately gave us a semi-private alcove to hide our shame; as we were sipping coffee and raisiny PX, local customers, including lots of kids, were piling in for a sliver of pre-dinner jamón.

For many restaurant geeks who have cultivated their own habits and preferences, the faultline appears where desirable restaurant meets unwanted dinner slot. If the only chance of eating somewhere at the bleeding edge of culinary adventure in the next 12 months is to have dinner at 10.30pm, is taking the table a show of Yogi-like flexibility or a compromise too far?

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