Working backwards from an eight o'clock table in Mayfair

Mount Street, Bruton Place, the dining rooms off Berkeley Square and the older hotel restaurants behind Park Lane: none of them are more than a nine minute walk from each other, which is the one fact about this district worth carrying around. A table at eight means leaving the room at ten to, not at half past seven.

Companions who work this postcode know which rooms seat two comfortably and which ones put you in the middle of the floor. If you name the restaurant when you write, she comes to the table rather than the lobby, which is usually the tidier arrangement.

An hour before the table is the part people underrate. It is where an evening either settles or does not, and it is why the ninety minute booking at £400 exists: enough time to move from a bar to a dining room without anybody glancing at a watch.

The bars worth the walk sit inside the hotels rather than on the street here. Most of them take a reservation and none of them mind two people arriving separately, five minutes apart, which is the ordinary way a booking in W1K begins.

W1K 4HR keeps its check in desk out of sight of the entrance, so somebody walking to the lifts passes nobody with a question. W1K 2AL has the quietest lobby of the six and a side entrance on Carlos Place. W1K 1PN and W1K 1QA both face the park, with in room dining that runs late enough to matter.

W1S 4BP sits on Albemarle Street with a door that reads as a private house, and W1J 9BR marks the southern corner of the district. None of these hotels is connected to the desk in any way. She arrives as your guest, takes the lift and knocks, and nobody downstairs is involved.

Green Park is four minutes from the Piccadilly end of the district, on the Jubilee, Piccadilly and Victoria lines. Bond Street is five minutes from the Brook Street and Grosvenor Square side, and carries the Central and Jubilee lines plus the Elizabeth line, which is what makes arrivals from the east so quick. Hyde Park Corner is seven minutes from the Park Lane hotels and the sensible choice when the Piccadilly traffic has stopped moving.

In practice a companion coming from inside W1 walks. One crossing from SW1 or WC2 takes the Tube and covers the last stretch on foot. The journey sits inside the fee whichever it is, and your confirmation time already accounts for it.

Four lines are enough: the hour, the length, the building or the restaurant, and a name. Romilly replies in ten to fifteen minutes with who is free, when she can be at the door and what the booking costs, all in the same thread. Her fee is handed over in person once she is in the room.

One check runs after you agree: the name the reservation carries, the building and the room number, confirmed on WhatsApp or Telegram and used for nothing afterwards. It takes a line, and nobody asks about it again.

Angelika is Mayfair based and times a walk to a table better than the map does. Luna is the most striking arrival on the list and the easiest to sit with afterwards. Samanta looks expensive without a single visible label, which in this postcode is the harder trick.

From just outside, Bianka reaches any W1 door in twenty minutes from Knightsbridge, Milena is built for a long dinner and better across a longer one, Lea walks up from St James's in ten, Cindy prefers an early table and comes across from Chelsea in twenty, and Molly is a short walk east and good for a counter seat when the dining room feels like too much.

Anyone else on On The Books travels here on the same figures.

Two hours at £500 covers a drink and dinner if you keep to one restaurant. Three hours at £700 is the honest length for a Mount Street table taken at its own pace. The four hour dinner date, £900, suits the night when the table is only half the plan. Ten hours at £1,800 is the booking guests make when there is an early flight and they have learned which kind of night makes it easier.

South across Piccadilly the ground becomes St James's and clubland. The avenue itself, from the Circus down to Hyde Park Corner, has its own page at Piccadilly. East over Regent Street the streets narrow into Soho within four minutes of Hanover Square. North across Oxford Street the village begins at Marylebone. Park Lane, Berkeley Square and Grosvenor Square all sit inside the district described here, and the wider postcode is set out on the W1 page.