Dinner on the first floor, with the pictures left to speak for themselves

The pub on the corner, and the room above it

The Audley stands where Mount Street meets South Audley Street, a Victorian public house of the kind Mayfair once had on most corners and now has on very few. Some years ago it was restored by Artfarm, the hospitality business of Iwan and Manuela Wirth, whose names most people know from the gallery they founded, Hauser & Wirth. Downstairs it is still a pub, and on a weekday evening it is full of people who came straight from work and plainly intend to stay.

Upstairs is something else. Mount St. Restaurant occupies the first floor of the same building and runs as its own dining room, quieter, paler and considerably more composed than the bar beneath it. The windows look along Mount Street, and the walls carry work that would not look out of place in the Wirths' own galleries, because a good deal of it comes from that same world of artists and collectors.

A private view without the speeches

At an opening you look at the pictures over other people's shoulders while somebody thanks the sponsors. Here you look at them between courses, from a chair, with nothing whatever expected of you. That is the whole appeal of the room, and the reason it suits a first dinner better than most in W1: there is always something to talk about that is neither of you.

The knack is to let the work do its job without making it the subject. Ask for a table with a view of one piece rather than a seat in the middle of everything. Mention it once, early, and then leave it alone; if it was a good choice it will come back into the conversation of its own accord, usually around the second glass. Do not get up to read labels in the middle of a course, and do not photograph anything on the walls. If you want to know what you have been sitting beside, ask at the end of the evening, which is the right time.

Holding the table

This is a booking of dinner at a held table, and like every one of those it starts with you. Reserve in your own name, choose the hour, and then write to Tamsin with the room, the time and whether your companion should meet you at the door or come to your hotel first so that you arrive together. The house does not telephone restaurants for its guests and has no arrangement with this one or with any other.

Four hours at £900 is the right length for this room. It allows a drink somewhere nearby first, a dinner that is not hurried and the walk afterwards, without anybody glancing at a watch over pudding. Two hours at £500 does a plain supper and nothing more, which rather wastes a room like this one. Ask for a window table if you can get one, because the view down the street in the last of the light is part of the evening.

Your companion arrives at the time Tamsin gave you, and the fee is handed to her in person as she does, in the exact figure agreed. It is not added to the restaurant's bill, not left with the staff and not mentioned again by either of you.

Before dinner, a quarter of an hour in the gardens

Behind the buildings on the south side of the street lies Mount Street Gardens, a long, planted space full of benches, most of them carrying small plaques in memory of people who liked sitting there. The Jesuit church on Farm Street has a door onto it, and the Grosvenor Chapel stands at its South Audley Street end. On a fine evening it is the calmest fifteen minutes in Mayfair, and it is where a companion who knows the district will very likely suggest you meet.

If the day allows more, Hauser & Wirth's London gallery is on Savile Row, a quarter of an hour east on foot across Bond Street, and it is open to anyone who walks in. An afternoon there followed by dinner under the same owners' pictures has a pleasing symmetry, and it gives the evening a thread without anyone having to invent one. For the history of the street itself, and why every building along it is the colour of a flowerpot, read the note on the 1880s rebuilding before you go.

Company for the first floor

Three women on the list are particularly good in this room, and all three sit among the brunettes. Vanessa would choose it herself. She likes the window table and the slightly peculiar pictures, she is content to say little for the first hour, and she will spend part of the evening looking down the street with obvious pleasure. She is at her best over three hours or more, which is what this dinner asks for.

Liana is the one to ask for if the pictures are the point. She paints a little and says almost nothing about it, but she is generous and exact about other people's work, and she has a habit of looking at one thing slightly too long that suits a room like this perfectly. Tina is the opposite temperament: quick, funny, delighted to argue about whether a picture is any good, and so at home on Mount Street that she walks to most of her bookings.

What to leave out

It is worth saying what this evening is not. It is not an opening, so there is nobody to be seen by and nothing to be seen doing. It is not a lesson, so there is no need to know the artists or to have read about them beforehand. And it is not a performance for your companion's benefit. She has sat under well known pictures before and will be far more interested in what you make of them than in what you know.

Keep the telephone in a pocket, keep your voice at the level of your own table, and let the room be what it is: a handsome dining room above a pub, with some remarkable things on the walls. That is plenty. Guests who treat it that way tend to come back, and to ask for the same table and the same company.