Playing in moderation

What the house is trying to arrange

An evening of play and then four flights up is a better night for this house than a guest the door has to close on. That is not a slogan but the brief the cellar was fitted out to in 2024. Three tables, not eight. Midnight, not three in the morning. No credit. No cash point within these walls. The counter in the hall stops serving at half past ten, an hour and a half before the tables, and guests notice the gap within two evenings.

Age, on every visit

Eighteen in France, photographic identification every time, including for the guest who was at table an hour before. A photograph of a card on a telephone screen is not the card.

What the staff do, at that moment

• Hold a limit you have set. Name the figure before you sit and it is written on the sheet.
• Say the hour the first time it is asked for. The clock stands at the stair end.
• Hold the chair for twenty minutes while you go up, eat, or stand in the street.
• Refuse you for a run of days at your own asking, noted where the next shift will find it.
• Sign a self-exclusion at the desk in the hall, in person, in force from that night.

None of it appears on this website, and that is deliberate. Each a thing said aloud to somebody who is looking at you, thirty paces and twelve steps from where you are standing. A set of fields on a screen would be neater for the house and thinner for the guest.

Five signs worth naming

• You are thinking about the cellar while standing on the rampart at high water in a gale, which is the reason anybody comes to this town.
• You went back down the twelve steps after saying out loud that you had finished for the night.
• You know which machine by the Grande Porte is nearest, and you learned it this week.
• You would not repeat the size of the stake to anybody who knows you.
• You would prefer not to be addressed by name. You are, because nine rooms and ten staff is a small house.

How the staff are trained

Whoever works that door is trained ahead of a first shift and in each year after that: the law, how to read identification, how to refuse somebody without making a scene of it, and what to do once drink has got ahead of play. The manager on duty descends twice in the course of an evening. Each of ours has shut a table before closing, and neither was afterwards asked why.

How to ask

Speak to whoever is at the door, or to the desk in the hall. It need not be well expressed. It will not be turned into a moment, and it will not be spoken of to anybody else.