Bianka, warm company from the Jordaan canal streets

The first thing most people notice about Bianka is not the hazel eyes, and not the long light brown hair with its sun-kissed ends, although both do their work. It is the attention. She listens the way a good host listens, turned slightly toward you, and she will pick up something you mentioned half an hour earlier as though it had been waiting patiently in the corner of the table.

The second thing they notice is that the warmth is not a performance she switches on. At 23 she has a sultry, unhurried presence, 165 centimetres, curvy, with a taste for lace and old tailoring she has been collecting since she was a teenager. Vintage fashion is a genuine habit rather than a line on a profile; ask about the coat and you will get the shop, the decade and the argument she had over the price.

She is a Jordaan woman, and the district suits her. These streets reward anyone who likes a slow evening, and hers tend to begin with a glass of something Italian and finish considerably later than the plan allowed.

She cooks properly too, the kind of cooking learned at somebody's elbow rather than off a screen, and she can describe a ragu in a way that makes hotel room service feel like a personal failing.

Wine is the other thread running through her. She tastes with curiosity rather than ceremony, and she is happy to be talked out of her own opinion, which makes her very easy company at a table of strangers. Luna is the one to ask about a bottle if Bianka is already spoken for on the night you want. English is her working language, and she speaks it softly, with the occasional pause while she finds the exact word instead of the near miss.

Hers is an evening that starts slowly and then refuses to be hurried. A glass of something Italian in a small Jordaan bar first, one of the ones with six tables and a handwritten list, while she asks about the flight and actually waits for the answer.

Dinner should be Italian and unfashionable, the sort of place where the menu is short because the kitchen only cooks what it does well. She will take charge of the ordering if you give her the chance, explain why the ragu is right, and somewhere between the second glass and the coffee whatever you had planned will quietly stop mattering. Afterwards, a walk along the canal in whichever coat she found in a vintage shop that month, and back to your hotel by the long route, because the short one would finish the conversation too early.