Private Club Etiquette for Guests and Hosts

As a guest at a private club, never offer to pay or tip, because the member signs and there is nowhere for your money to go. Keep your phone in your pocket and your papers in your bag until your host brings up the reason for the meal. As a host, use your club when a conversation needs privacy and two unhurried hours, and book a restaurant when your guest would feel outranked by the room.

Alexandra Roberts on executive presence and social protocol

A private club is the last place in the Bay Area where the rules of a room are actually written down. There is a book. Members are given it, or at least told where it is kept, and the staff know it by heart. Guests are given nothing, which is why the person most likely to break a club rule at any given lunch is the one person at the table who was never shown it.

I spent years on the other side of this, in hotels, at The Lowell in New York and at Four Seasons, watching guests work out a room’s rules in real time. The good ones watched the staff before they did anything. Most of what follows is what the staff would tell a guest, if a guest ever asked.

Arriving

Give your host’s name at the front desk, not your own. You are expected as their guest, and that is how the desk will have you written down. Then wait where you are put. At the Pacific-Union Club, in the brownstone Flood Mansion at the top of Nob Hill, or at any club of that age, the hall is not a lobby and the library is not a waiting room, and a guest who wanders in to admire the books has walked into a members’ room alone.

Be on time. Five minutes early is gracious; twenty minutes early makes you a stranger loitering in someone else’s house, and the staff then have to decide what to do with you. Check your coat. Read the invitation again for dress before you leave home, and if it says nothing, wear a jacket, because the cost of being the only one in a jacket is nothing and the cost of being lent one at the door is a story your host will tell. I go through how to read a club invitation’s wording in dress codes explained.

Phones

Many clubs forbid phone calls in the dining room and the lounges, and a good number would rather not see a phone at all. Treat the building like a library. Silence it before you go in. If a call cannot wait, excuse yourself and take it on the street, and do not make a show of how important it was when you sit back down.

Papers

Several of the older clubs still prohibit business documents at the table, a rule that strikes visitors from Sand Hill Road as quaint until they watch a member being asked, very quietly, to put a term sheet away. The member is embarrassed. You are the reason. Leave the deck in your bag, and leave the laptop at the office, and let the host decide when and where business is discussed, because in a club that decision is theirs and it is usually made with the coffee.

Money

There is no check. The member signs a chit, or simply gives their number, and the charge goes to their account at the end of the month.

Guests reach for their wallets anyway. Out of decency, mostly, and a reluctance to be seen being paid for, which I understand and which still makes everyone uncomfortable, because the waiter cannot take your card and your host now has to refuse an offer that was never possible. Do not tip either. Most clubs prohibit it and pay their staff through a service charge or a holiday fund the members contribute to. Your thanks go to the staff by name, on the way out, and to your host on paper, the next day, in the way I describe in the thank-you note after a business dinner.

Photographs

Do not photograph the paintings or the people at the next table, even when your host says they do not mind, because the room was never theirs to give away.

Club, restaurant or hotel: choosing the room

The table below is how I advise members deciding where to take a client. Rules differ from club to club and change more often than members admit, so treat every cell as typical, and treat the member’s word on the night as final.

Where each option fits (and where it does not)

Members overuse their clubs. A club lunch is the right call for a conversation that would be overheard anywhere else, or for an old client who will enjoy being let into the building. It is the wrong call for a founder hosting an investor they have met once, because a club on the first date reads as positioning, and the investor will spend the meal wondering what you are trying to tell them about yourself. Book a restaurant with a private room for that. If the meal has to produce a decision with paper in front of it, the restaurant wins outright, since half the clubs on Nob Hill would ask you to put the paper away.

Hotel dining rooms are underrated. They are dull, and that is useful for a guest flying in from Singapore who wants to go upstairs at nine.

The newer members’ clubs suit a first social meeting better than the old ones do, with one warning: everyone at the next table is also a member, and some of them are in your industry. If the fact of the meeting is itself confidential, it does not belong there.

When you are the host

Tell your guest the rules before they arrive, in the confirmation, plainly. “Jackets in the dining room, and the club is strict about phones.” One line saves them the walk to the coat check to borrow a blazer two sizes too big. Arrive first. Meet them in the hall, not at the table, because the hall is the part of the building a guest cannot enter without you. Sign the chit where they cannot see it, and introduce them to the staff who will remember them next time, which in a good club is everyone.

Seat your guest facing the room, with the view, and take the chair against the wall yourself; the three-seat rule covers why the chair matters more than people think. The rest of the hosting discipline is the same as in a restaurant and is set out in client dinner etiquette.

Membership

Never ask.

Asking your host to put you up for membership at the end of a lunch they have just signed for is the fastest way I know to stop being invited, and it happens every season, usually from someone who has been in the Bay Area about eighteen months and has mistaken a warm afternoon for an opening. Membership at the older clubs runs on proposers and seconders, and on waiting lists measured in years. A member who wants you there will raise it, typically after you have been their guest several times and behaved as though you had no idea the question existed.

That last part is most of it. Clubs are a test of how a person behaves inside rules they were not shown, which is also a fair description of most rooms an executive walks into, and the reason I keep returning to it in social protocol in the Bay Area. More of the room-by-room protocol is collected in the field notes.