How to Get a Reservation at BiBi (Mayfair, London)

BiBi is chef-patron Chet Sharma’s progressive Indian restaurant on North Audley Street in Mayfair, a jewel-box room of roughly 33 seats where polished mango wood, antique glass and a velvet curtain frame a menu that reworks the flavours of the subcontinent through Sharma’s Oxford-trained, Michelin-honed lens. Since it opened in 2021 it has become one of the hardest small tables in London: the dining room seats only a few dozen, the open-kitchen counter is the seat everyone wants, and recognition from the World’s 50 Best Discovery list plus a National Restaurant Awards cocktail win keep demand well ahead of supply. This guide is about getting the reservation, starting with how BiBi’s booking actually works and where the returned seats hide. For the wider city picture, see our guide to the hardest restaurants to book in London.

How booking at BiBi works

BiBi takes reservations through SevenRooms, the same system its JKS siblings use, via the booking page on bibirestaurants.com. There is no walk-in queue for the main tasting experience and no phone-only workaround: you book the online calendar or you wait. The diary generally opens about eight weeks ahead, with Thursday and Friday lunches typically opening on a shorter window (closer to four weeks out), and tables are then released on a rolling basis. The prime evening slots for the Chef’s Selection dinner menu (around £145) tend to be claimed quickly once they appear, so the practical move is to be looking at the exact date you want the moment it becomes bookable rather than a week later.

Every booking is held by a card, and larger parties carry a non-refundable deposit. If you are new to how release timing works across the city, our explainer on when restaurant reservations open covers the pattern SevenRooms venues like BiBi follow.

Why the table is so hard

The math is brutal in the nicest way. The dining room seats only around 33 covers across a handful of velvet booths and a short row of counter stools at the open kitchen, with a heated terrace adding roughly 20 more when it is in use. That indoor room is a fraction of a normal Mayfair dining room, and the counter, where you watch Sharma’s team plate and explain each course, is the single most requested seat in the house.

Add a steady stream of press, a place on the World’s 50 Best Discovery list, and a following built since 2021, and prime Friday and Saturday evenings can vanish almost as soon as they open. Its JKS sibling Gymkhana and other hot tables like Mountain run into the same wall, so it helps to have a backup in mind.

The off-peak and back-door angles

A date that reads as full for a weekend dinner is often still winnable if you flex on how and when you sit. A few angles that work at BiBi specifically:

• Book lunch, not dinner. The midday set menu (around £65) is a shorter, more affordable way in, and its slots clear far less aggressively than the evening Chef’s Selection.
• Ask for the counter or the terrace separately. The open-kitchen counter and the roughly 20-seat heated terrace are distinct inventory from the indoor booths, so a night that looks full for a booth can still have a counter stool or a terrace table.
• Aim for early in the week. Tuesday and Wednesday services turn over more availability than the Friday and Saturday peak everyone competes for.
• Try BiBi Lates. The after-9pm late service, Monday to Thursday, is drinks and snacks rather than the full tasting menu, a lower-commitment way through the velvet curtain with a lighter cancellation penalty.
• Take a shoulder time. A 6pm or a late 9:30pm seating is easier to land than the 8pm sweet spot, and the food is identical.

When cancellations reappear

BiBi’s cancellation policy is the quiet key to a last-minute table. Standard bookings of up to four guests are charged if they cancel, amend, or no-show within 48 hours of the reservation (£50 per person at lunch, £100 per person at dinner), which means a lot of unwanted seats get released right around that 48-hour line as diners bail before the penalty lands. Larger parties feel the same pressure at the 72-hour mark.

Practically, that gives you two live windows to catch: the moment new dates first become bookable, and the two-day run-up to a service when committed tables come back. On SevenRooms these returned seats can surface and disappear within minutes, and they rarely announce themselves, which is why refreshing the page once a day almost never works. Our note on SevenRooms hidden reservations explains why a table can read as fully booked and still open up.

Handing off the watch

You can land BiBi by hand if you are willing to stay alert. The catch is that the two windows that matter, the release and the 48-hour cancellation run-up, do not keep office hours, and a single counter stool or terrace table can come and go while you are asleep or in a meeting. That is the gap worth handing to something that never looks away.

Automating the watch

SeatSwiper watches the exact BiBi table you actually want, your date range, your party size, and the seating you prefer, around the clock, and books it the moment one opens, whether that is a fresh release or a cancellation coming back. It books on your own SevenRooms account, in your name, and nothing is resold. Your first booking is free, after that it is a flat $5, and only when it actually gets you the table, with no subscription. Starting a watch on a specific returned seat costs $1 to begin. Be clear on the limits: it works on Resy, SevenRooms, and OpenTable only, it needs your reservation account connected, and because a single seat can come down to a race, it is a far better watcher than any human but never a guarantee.