Restaurant and cafe table tops in Mayfair

Yes. Mayfair is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W1J, W1K, W1S. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. A quiet hour is worth more to us than a close bay. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

Internal walls are lath and plaster on studs with heavy framing behind, so a fixing finds either nothing at all or something very solid. Hospitality in an area like this is usually a converted house or an old inn, so the dining space is several small rooms rather than one, and each room takes a different table size. A goods lift takes a frame and saves a morning. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base.

A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. Two hands to a piece, however light it looks. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. Where the standing is short the pieces are counted off at the tail lift against the plan rather than checked once they are already inside. Nothing is left on a pavement while a space is found.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop templating. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. Repeat work is quoted against the original, not from scratch. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. Fit-out dates are worked backwards from the opening.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. Two-seaters and four-seaters come off one slab run. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. A shallow room decides the diameter early. Send a plan of each room with its table sizes against it, and say which covers are outdoors so the material can be split before anything is priced. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. Consistency across sites is a decision, not an accident.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Floors are boards over joists with a solid floor only in the service rooms, and the two meet somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. That is fine, but it has to be drawn: a room of one-offs prices differently from a room of repeats, and the difference is real rather than a markup. Chair backs do more damage than plates ever do.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. What decides the cut list here is the seating plan rather than the room shape, and one repeated table size nests far better than six one-offs. The count per slab is worked before a figure is given.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. A fit-out programme runs to an opening date that does not move, so the sizes are frozen and the slab committed earlier than most jobs need. The bases usually stay and only the pieces change.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. A long communal piece is a slab-length question.