The glass, a short walk, the table: six Mayfair pairs that never need a car

Four minutes, and why not five

Mayfair is built for walking and behaves as though nobody does. The grid between Park Lane and Regent Street is made of short streets, the squares sit close together, and most of the rooms worth an evening are a few hundred metres apart. Even so, a great many evenings here still involve finishing a drink, waiting for coats, standing at the kerb while a car is found, and then sitting through a loop of one way streets to reach a table that was a short stroll away.

The ceiling on this page is four minutes, door to door, at the pace of two people who are talking. Past that, a walk starts to need planning: a coat in winter, an umbrella for half the year, a moment on the corner working out which way to turn. Under it, the walk becomes the pause between the two halves of the evening, and you reach the restaurant on time because you left the bar when you meant to. Every pair below keeps inside that limit and runs in the same order, glass first and table second.

All six sit inside Mayfair or on its southern edge along Piccadilly and the top of St James's. None of the hotels or restaurants named has any connection with this desk. They are here because guests book them and because the walk between each pair is genuinely short.

Carlos Place to Mount Street: the martini trolley, then Scott’s

The shortest pair on the list, and the one suggested most often. The martini bar sits inside the hotel on Carlos Place, a low lit room of silvered surfaces where the martini arrives on a trolley and is finished beside you. It takes drinks seriously without being solemn about them, and it suits the first half hour of an evening, before either of you has decided how talkative to be.

Scott’s is on Mount Street, a couple of minutes from that door with the turn at the corner included. It has been a fish and shellfish room for a very long time, with a counter of crustacea at its centre and tables along the windows. Ask for a window if you can, because watching Mount Street at nine o'clock is half of what regulars come for. The walk is so short that the only way to be late for this table is to order a second drink you did not need.

Two pairs east of Bond Street

The hotel on Albemarle Street keeps the Donovan Bar, named after the photographer Terence Donovan and hung with his black and white prints. It is small, slightly clubby and quiet enough before eight that you can hear the ice. Gymkhana is on the same street, a minute away, a dark panelled Indian dining room modelled on the old sporting clubs of colonial India, with booths deep enough to make two people feel like the only table in the house. It is one of the harder reservations in W1, so the table is the half of this pair to secure first.

A few streets north, a hotel sits on the corner of Conduit Street and New Bond Street, and its bar is a calm place to wait for somebody coming across from the far side of Regent Street. Sketch is three minutes along Conduit Street in an eighteenth century townhouse divided into several rooms, each with its own mood and its own idea of what an evening ought to be. Tell the desk which of those rooms you have booked, because she dresses for the room rather than for the building.

Down to Piccadilly: the Rivoli Bar and Wiltons, Half Moon Street and Hide

The Rivoli Bar at W1J 9BR is a small, gilded Art Deco room, and it is the pair on this page that most rewards dressing for it. That house keeps a stricter code than the rest of the district, with jacket and tie expected in its dining room, so read the house rules before you set out. From the Arlington Street door, Bennet Street drops you on to St James's Street, and Wiltons is a few doors along Jermyn Street. Four minutes, most of it gently downhill.

Wiltons is old in a way very few London rooms still manage: fish, oysters in season, game in the autumn, and booths arranged for private conversation rather than for being seen. It traces itself to a shellfish stall of the 1740s and still feels like the kind of place where people keep the same table for years. It is the room Lea chooses when a guest wants an evening to slow down properly.

Further west, a townhouse hotel on Half Moon Street keeps a bar that rarely fills early. Walk down to Piccadilly and Hide is a short way along, looking across the traffic at Green Park, its rooms joined by a twisting oak staircase people remember long after the menu. Three minutes, and the natural pair for anyone staying at the Hyde Park Corner end of the district.

Park Lane, and the one pair under a single roof

W1K 1QA is the exception that proves the rule. Its bar and The Grill share a building, so the walk between them is a corridor rather than a pavement, and on a wet night in February that is worth more than any view. It is the pair to pick when the weather has turned, when one of you has come straight from a flight, or when neither of you wants to think about the route at all.

Brook Street is left off on purpose. Its bars are excellent, but their natural partner is that hotel’s own dining room, and from there most of the tables named here are six minutes or more on foot, which breaks the rule this page is built on.

Timing the move from glass to table

Fix the table time first and work backwards from it. For an eight o'clock table, meet in the bar at seven, order once, and stand up at eight minutes to eight. That leaves four minutes for the walk and four more for everything that slows a departure: the conversation that runs on, the bill that takes a while to arrive, the door held for somebody else. On a busy night most dining rooms in this postcode will hold a table for a short grace period and not a great deal longer, and a four minute walk is what lets you keep it without watching the clock.

The desk plans around the same arithmetic. Three hours at £700 covers a drink, a proper dinner and a slow walk back. The four hours of the dinner booking at £900 leave room for the hour after the plates go, which is usually the best of the four and the one guests forget to plan for. When you write, give the table time and name the bar, and the reply comes back with the minute she will walk into the bar.

Company for a two room evening

An evening in two rooms asks something slightly different of the person sharing it: ease in a bar, where talk is quick, and ease across a table, where it slows and settles. Samanta lives in Mayfair and knows most of these rooms from the inside; she dresses so quietly well that nobody can name what she is wearing. Margo is at her best at a formal table, Wiltons or the arcaded dining room on Piccadilly, and will have read the papers before you have. Angelika, also based in the district, times a walk between two doors better than any app.

Samanta and Margo sit among the brunettes on the index and Angelika among the raven haired names, though temperament matters here far more than colouring. Tell the desk which pair you have chosen and it will suggest whoever starts closest at that hour. If the evening belongs to Covent Garden instead, the note on the conservatory at Clos Maggiore does the same job for WC2.