Hillie Marshall Talks Dinner Dates

30 October 2009

0Comments | Comment on this Article

Back in 1989 Hillie Marshall launched Dinner Dates, today it's one of the country’s leading dining and social events companies for single people. She now has over 16,000 members nationwide.

This year Dinner Dates is celebrating it's 20th anniversary so I caught up with Hillie to talk about how her career has taken many unexpected paths and what lies ahead for her.

- Dinner Dates is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year so for anyone who hasn’t heard about it what is it all about?

We are a social event and holiday company for single people we put on dinner parties every week for thirty two people, an equal number of men and women of a similar age, we put on buffets and take people to the opera, ballet, theatre, musicals.

We do six black tie balls a year we take people on cultural days out and we hold sporting events such as clay pigeon shooting, horse riding, tennis, golf, go-carting.

Then in the summer we do special events like Royal Ascot, Henley Royal Regatta, we take people to polo as well as doing cultural events, last Sunday we went to Bletchley Park where the Enigma machine is, and we are going to the Household Cavalry Museum soon and the Churchill Museum.

We also do holidays and this year we took a group to China, we went to Cologne, we took a group skiing, we are

just off to Budapest, we have been to Turkey, Portugal and we are just in the process of organising a holiday to Vietnam next year so there’s something going on all the time and there’s something for everybody. 

- Is your aim to bring people together...

Well yes everyone that joins us is single and everybody would like to meet someone but we do say very strongly to people when they join that we don’t promise to introduce them to their perfect partner, as far as we are concerned that is an impossible thing to promise anybody there’s a hidden X-factor that nobody can account for. 

Also to think that you are going to pay thousands of pounds, well not with us it’s actually £200, you are going to spend a lot of money with an agency and the person that you have been looking for all your life is sitting in the middle of their books it just doesn’t happen.

But saying that people have met through us and they have also met indirectly through us so we say to people we promise to hundreds of other single people and dating is a numbers game the more people you meet the more chance there is of meeting someone right for you but you will make loads of new friends and you will meet their friends and it just has a knock on effect.

- Was Dinner Dates set up in way that is more social than matchmaking, because the whole blind date thing is still quite embarrassing?

Well I will tell you how it stared it was twenty years ago and I was going through a dreadful divorce myself. At the time I was a theatre producer and I had a couple of girlfriends in the car and we were going off to see the latest show that I had on and we started a conversation about how people meet each other and I said that there was absolutely no way I would go to a dating agency because I would be absolutely terrified meeting someone under the clock at Waterloos Station with a red rose in my button hole or something.

And my friend Julie said well why don’t people do dinner parties like you used to? I used to be forever matchmaking my ex-husbands single friends with mine. Anyway I got given a dare, made up the name Dinner Dates put an ad in the paper and to my utter amazement loads of people kept phoning, I have obviously found a niche in the market and that is how Dinner Dates was born. I used to book up places that I personally wanted to go to, the sort of restaurants that I used to enjoy and all the clubs that I had ever wanted to go.

I found that I had a huge following that enjoyed doing the same things as me and really that’s how from absolutely nothing it grew up and we now have 17,000 members.

0Comments | Be the first to comment!