They will send you sample menus with different prices and a wine list. Next, they invite you to come in and discuss what exactly you would like If you want a Chinese banquet, that’s fine. If you want fish, chips and mushy peas, that’s fine, too, albeit at a cost. And if you want a naked girl to spring out of a cake, this can also be arranged.Cabaret? All part of the service.

Gary Glitter has played there, as has Elton John and Kiki Dee. Three glass pianos suspended one on top of the other inside a glass case can be arranged should you so desire it, or a march past by the Marines. Tonight, though, an Elvis lookalike is warming up in the Lancaster Ballroom at the same time that the room is being laid up, about two hours in advance of the 250 people who will be coming to dinner.The first task is to strike the room. Tables are rolled in by tablemen and the carpet taken up ready to receive this season’s needle-fine stilettos, and the staging is set. Next a crew arrives and “cloths” the tables with Irish linen, shaken out and laid with the crease covering the leg to conceal it.

Then the wine butlers dressed in grey overcoats over red jackets lay up the tables, assisted by waiters in white jackets.The napkin is laid flat and the cutlery arranged around it Later, it is folded into a dunce’s cap, a lily or a crown. Next, the ancillaries go on: the butter dishes, flowers, candelabra, cruets and the glasses. All bathed in floodlights that glare down “so we can see any impurity in the layout”, says Andrew Coy, the banqueting manager. Finally, it is the job of the butlers to polish all this paraphernalia.Backstage, the wines are being chilled or opened, plates are being warmed, waiters’ white cloths, their gloves and jackets are laid ready, and sugar, milk and redcurrant jelly take up their stations. The microphones will be checked, as will all the lightbulbs to make sure they are working.

The very last job is to polish the dance floor and get it to shine.In the reception room, drinks are laid out on trays, a white piano is tuned and lit while Marco, the reception head waiter, prepares to meet you at the door and ensure that you go to the right place.Meanwhile, while you are enjoying your cocktail in the cool of the reception area, Mr Sergio and Mr Fausto are briefing their teams of waiters, six in each, principally foreign nationals from Italy, Yugoslavia and Germany who look like errant students squeezed into their Sunday best when they’d much rather be playing football. One waiter has another gripped in a headlock, and there’s a fair bit of horseplay.At one point, when the banqueting manager has disappeared out of sight, an Italian waiter comes up to me and, standing within six inches of my face, asks: “What you doin’ ‘ere?” Before I have a chance to reply, another Italian waiter elbows him out of the way and also enquires: “What you doin’ ‘ere?” The first one takes exception to this interruption, but, after explaining that I am “doin’” an article, they seem satisfied and wander off.Backstage, it is a warren that cannot have changed much in the last 100 years. A seasoned rabbit might be able to negotiate its curving stairways, different levels and numerous antechambers at one glance, personally, I need a compass to find my way between the various rooms with names like “Lancaster hotplate”, “servery”, “still room” and “plating room”, and there’s nothing very logical about the layout.Tonight’s menu is a mousse of pike made as quenelles served in a lobster brandy and cream sauce, followed by a wild mushroom consomme infused with Madeira, then a “tornedos” of beef with red wine sauce, “Pommes olivette” (roast potatoes to you and I), baton carrots, French beans and baby corn. And, finally, an Edelmann special, a Grand Marnier souffle with a Grand Marnier-flavoured orange sauce, followed by “pralines en surprise”, the surprise being atmospheric wisps of smoke created by dry ice.To my way of thinking, souffles for 250 people carried along corridors and down stairs without sinking is a high-wire act. To Edelmann, souffles and synchronised cloche-work are part of what differentiates the Savoy from Grosvenor House. And I have seen with my own eyes that his souffles do not sink in the same way as most people’s.In any case, we are not at the souffle stage yet. The diners have been ushered into the turquoise Lancaster ballroom, where every fork, knife, spoon and glass has passed a colonel’s parade.

On the other side of the wall, action kicks off in the Lancaster hotplate – a long corridor of a room with a hotplate running its full length – about 60 feet that belts out as much heat as a ship’s engine room. “I always tell the management that food’ll never go cold here,” Edelmann drily says. On the far-end wall there is an ancient pink neon sign that reads “SILENCE”. It’s switched off.Lines of plates three-abreast stretch down the length of the hotplate. Each has its quenelles in place and, over that, sauce is ladled, pastry tucked in and they’re ready for the first team to pick up.