Violetta, a riverside table in Greenwich

Violetta stands 178 cm, tall and slender, and she moves through a crowd the way a boat moves through calm water, without effort or apology. Her long black hair is sleek and glassy, her eyes are brown and very steady, and she dresses in clean lines with a touch of gold: a black column dress, a gold cuff, a camel coat for the river wind. She is abroad at present and returns on 2 October.

Mysterious at first, elegant throughout and confident without ever raising her voice, Violetta rewards patience. Her English is fluent and dry, and her humour arrives a second after you expect it. She swims long distances before breakfast, haunts second-hand bookshops for first editions and goes to stand-up comedy far more often than anyone would guess from looking at her. The contrast is deliberate, and she enjoys watching people discover it.

Her Greenwich dinner is at the Trafalgar Tavern on Park Row, the grand nineteenth-century tavern on the river beside the Old Royal Naval College, where tall windows look straight onto the Thames and the Canary Wharf towers opposite. She orders the whitebait, a nod to the famous whitebait dinners Victorian politicians once held along this stretch, and then something more serious. Afterwards she walks you along the river past the college's twin domes, saying very little and missing nothing.

Violetta lives in Belgravia, around forty minutes east, and dinner dates resume on 2 October. The Greenwich page names hotels from the riverfront to the O2; see rates for the dinner date, and ask booking to pencil in her first free evening.