We ate snails, but nobody really mentioned it. That’s the sort of evening this was. Not normal. Me, I’d never eaten snails. Often meant to, but always chickened out. I remember my father eating them, on holiday, when I was a child. There were those snail shell-shaped tongs, and a stick with a hook on it, like an Egyptian embalming tool. Put me off. Didn’t leave me feeling too hungry.

These snails, though, were delicious. They were on a chorizo mash, and part of a first-course tasting platter that also included (hang on, let me check my notes) squid and mint salad on a crab tapioca fritter, and braised tofu with shiitake and yuzu tahini cream. And this total stranger sitting opposite me, Dave, let’s call him, did look up at one point and say “Mmm, this is really good”, but it wasn’t really much of an opening. Mainly we were talking about his relationship with his father. “I sometimes think he lies quite a lot,” he had just said. It would have felt a bit rude to focus on whether he liked the snails.

Dave, you see, was concentrating on the other menu. Because we had two. One started with the snails, as mentioned. That was the food menu. The other started with the words “When did you stop being a child?” That was the Conversation Menu. Because we were taking part, Dave and I, in something called a Conversation Meal. As part of a group of about 30, we were in an upstairs room at The Providores, the lovely little restaurant on Marylebone High Street, Central London, run by the New Zealand chef Peter Gordon. You eat from one menu and talk from the other.

“There are lots of things that you can do in London on your own,” explains Sophie Howarth, the former curator from Tate Modern who founded the School of Life, the organisation that has put on this evening, “but going for a nice meal isn’t one of them.”

The School of Life was founded last year, and is quite hard to describe in a way that won’t make people want to beat you with truncheons. Essentially, it is a non-profit enterprise that aims to teach slightly bleak and soulless London people to enjoy their lives a little more. It runs courses in Love, Politics, Work, Play and Family. It’s all about thought and philosophy, stepping back and noticing life, rather than just falling through it. The Conversation Dinners have been a particular success.

Arrive, then, and you are shown to a table. I’m with Jake, Jemima and Sharon, about whom I can tell you almost nothing. Jake and Sharon, I’d say, are in their thirties. Jemima is probably a bit younger. She is also foreign, in some way, but we aren’t talking about backgrounds. We’re drinking a cocktail and discussing the way that François de la Rochefoucauld said “We rarely think people make sense unless they agree with us”. Rochefoucauld was a French author who died in 1680. He isn’t sitting at our table. I don’t agree with him at all. Joel, Jemima and Sharon all do. None of them makes any sense, though.

This is the aphorisms course, the pre-starter starter. Ideally, we are told, each aphorism should be considered as a sort of amuse-bouche. “Any idiot can face a crisis,” says Anton Chekhov, who isn’t there either, “it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” It’s slightly hard going as we all take turns to expound vaguely. When we get to “I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean” (G. K. Chesterton), Jake starts talking about MPs’ expenses and there is a palpable sense of relief. Lack of substance is a strain.

“We try to concentrate,” Howarth says afterwards, “on subjects that are so obvious that normal conversation overlooks them. We don’t want questions that have an easy answer, or that can let people show off.” I do get the point. On MPs’ expenses I start showing off like anything.

For the first course proper, we all grab our glasses and cutlery, and move seats. This is when I meet Dave, and start worrying about snails. When did you stop being a child? What were family mealtimes like in your childhood? Tell me about a memorable conversation you had with one or both of your parents? There’s a surprising inclination to be quite open and intimate. Indeed, it’s very hard not to be. In retrospect, I can recall almost everything that Dave said, and little that I did. To be honest, that’s not how my conversations normally pan out. I remember a friend, who had just moved to London, bitching about how boring the city made everybody. “All anybody ever talks about,” he said, “is which bit of London they’ve just come from and how long it’ll take them to get home again.” There’s none of that here. By the end of the night I’ve heard about a divorce, the breakdown of a torrid affair, a business collapse and a battle with cancer.

For the main course, we shift to another table. I have the roast Elwy Valley lamb shoulder with vegetables. Joanne, sitting next to me, has the ginger roast pumpkin, smoked mash, wild mushrooms, Asian greens, maple pecans, black-bean dressing and Parmesan. It looks good, and I’d quite like to ask her about it. Instead, though, I have to ask her about the most unlikely person with whom she has ever become friends. She says a girl from work.

That’s the weird thing about all this. Much of the conversation is strangely boring. Not all of it, but quite a lot. Possibly it’s just that having a conversation menu is a great leveller. In normal life, out in the wild, some people are good at talking to strangers, and some aren’t. If you aren’t, you know it, and generally you shut up. Here, everybody gets to talk. “Some things work,” Howarth says, “and some things don’t. We’re still fine-tuning it. We used to have a final course of pictures, but that was all wrong. But I do think that by adding quite a lot of artifice to the process it actually leads to more authenticity. A normal dinner party is actually a pull of many systems. In conversation we tend to default to questions that either have easy answers or that we hope that people will ask us back so that we can tell them how great they are.” She hopes, she says, that people are learning skills. It’s not meant to be about making friends. It’s just about the process of chatting.

Pudding is cheeses, mango and raspberry sorbets and a lovely chocolate mousse cake that comes with a slightly laboured conversation about the nature of love. I’m on another table now, largely made up of slightly embittered single ladies in their late thirties who think that the only love you can have is with your equally embittered female friends, and everybody else is a bastard. I speak, they sigh. Things grow confessional. Weepy, almost. “Lust,” growls one woman, about a recent relationship, “not love.”

And then, quite abruptly, the Conversation Menu is at an end. Some people keep staring at it, as if looking for more words. The rest of us look at each other, bashfully, as silence spreads around the table.

“I’ve never eaten snails before,” I say, after a while.

For details of the next conversation meal, visit www.theschooloflife.com

Explore Food & Drink

• Gordon Ramsay

• Heston Blumenthal

• Recipes

• Wine

• Real Food

• Drinks

• Anjum Anand

• Eating Out

• Video Recipes

Times Recommends

• Top Ten most searched for recipes
• Chalet Chef 2010: the winning menus
• Gin and pomegranate jellies