Two courses and the bill by 19:45: dinner against a hard stop

Forty five minutes, taken apart

A dinner with a hard stop rarely fails in the kitchen. It fails in three other places: the wait for a menu, the gap between the first course and the second, and the long minute spent trying to catch somebody's eye for the bill. Remove those three and two courses fit inside forty five minutes with room to spare.

Here is the shape that works, counted from the moment you sit. Minutes nought to five: order everything, both courses and the drinks, before the menus leave the table. Five to twenty: the first course. Twenty to thirty five: the main, with the bill asked for as it arrives. Thirty five to forty: settle up and find the coats. Forty to forty five: the walk to wherever the evening has to be.

That last five is the one people forget, and on this estate it matters. A restaurant across the dock on Marsh Wall is seven or eight minutes from Canada Square on foot, not two, and a lift to the fortieth floor of your own building is another three at the far end. Count the walk before you choose the room.

Say it when you book, not when you sit down

The most useful sentence in this note goes into the booking, spoken or typed into the notes field: 'We have a hard stop at a quarter to eight. Can the kitchen do two courses by then?' Kitchens on the estate hear some version of it every week. They would far rather know at booking than discover it at the table, and a good one answers with a plan: an earlier slot, a table near the kitchen or the door, a word to the section about which dishes come out fastest.

Book the first sitting you can reasonably make. At 18:00 or 18:15 the room is half empty, the kitchen is fresh and nobody is waiting for your table, which is exactly when a restaurant will happily move quickly. At 19:30 the same kitchen is running a full room, and your forty five minutes are competing with everybody else's two hours.

Then order the dishes that cook in minutes. A steak done medium rare, fish off a grill, anything from a wok, a salad or something raw to start. Leave the slow braise, the risotto made to order and anything marked 'for two' to the evenings with no clock in them.

Kitchens on the estate that are built for pace

Some formats are simply faster, and the estate has a good example of each. A robata kitchen sends small plates out as they come off the grill, which suits a short dinner precisely, because no dish waits on any other. Roka, in the pavilion on Canada Square, is built on exactly that idea, and ordering the whole meal at once lets the kitchen pace it for you.

A steak room is quicker than it looks. Hawksmoor at Wood Wharf, under ten minutes east of the Jubilee line on foot, cooks over a charcoal grill, and a steak takes minutes rather than a quarter of an hour. Ask for the sides to come with the main and choose a first course that needs no cooking, and the kitchen has done its part before the half hour.

A brasserie with a long all day menu is the safe third choice, because it is built for turnover. The Ivy in the Park, the pavilion in Canada Square Park, keeps the sort of menu where half the dishes can reach the table within ten minutes of ordering. Tell them the minute you need to leave and they will build the meal around it.

The counters under Crossrail Place do the same job with less ceremony: a bowl, a stool, a bill. They are not an evening. They are a meal, and some nights a meal is the entire requirement.

What to avoid when the clock is fixed

Tasting menus, obviously. Anywhere with a band, because the first set can start just as the main arrives and a room full of listeners is served more slowly; Boisdale is a very good dinner and a poor forty five minutes. Anywhere reached by a lift to a high floor, because a queue for the lift and a cloakroom at the top can take ten minutes before you have seen a menu. And anywhere that does not take bookings, where a twenty minute wait for a table is half the evening gone.

Be wary, too, of the restaurant that is lovely and on the wrong side of the water. Marsh Wall and West India Quay are both good places to eat and both a bridge away from Canada Square. If the hard stop is a call at your desk on the estate, eat within three minutes of your own lift, not eight.

Where a short dinner sits inside the evening

The fixed point usually takes one of three shapes. A call with New York at a quarter to eight, which means dinner first and screens after. A car to City Airport or a late train out of London, where dinner is the last thing before a journey. Or the reverse: an early table because the rest of the night is already spoken for, and you would rather not spend it hungry.

Company fits all three. Ninety minutes at £400 covers the meal and a quarter of an hour either side of it; two hours at £500 lets the walk back be a walk rather than a sprint. When there is no hard stop at all, the better evening is the held table, four hours at £900 at a table nobody is waiting to clear.

For desks that stay on until the American close, the New York close note works the same problem from the other end of the evening, when the question is not how to eat quickly but where anybody will still seat you.

Three who can eat well at speed

Pace at a table is a skill, and not everybody has it. Three on slim and slender do. Samanta reads a menu the way she reads a contract, quickly and for what matters, and treats the wine list as a problem to be solved rather than a performance to sit through. Cindy talks in minutes and distances out of habit, so she will be on time and will know how long the walk back takes before you ask. Karolina is honest when a plan is bad and says so while there is still time to change it, which is the whole value of a companion at a dinner with a clock on it.

None of them makes forty five minutes feel like a pit stop, and that is the real test of a short dinner: whether it felt short. The Canary Wharf page has the walk times from each station and every hotel lobby, and the full ladder of lengths is on rates. Tell Maude the hard stop first and the rest of the booking follows from it.