A quiet rule, not a favour from the bartender
Most London bars stop taking new orders at a fixed hour, but a hotel is allowed to keep its own bar pouring for guests who are actually staying the night, well past the point the public bar downstairs has to close its till. It is not a wink or a favour arranged on the night. It is simply how a hotel bar is permitted to run for the people sleeping upstairs, and it is why a hotel bar can feel wide awake at one in the morning while the street outside has gone quiet.
Staff know this better than most guests do, since it is an entirely ordinary part of the job. A late order from a resident's table draws no attention at all, and nobody at a proper hotel bar treats one o'clock as an unusual hour to be pouring a drink.
Who counts as a resident for the evening
Booking a room makes the answer simple: anyone staying the night is treated as a resident, and a guest they bring to the bar is covered by the same courtesy. Visiting a companion who is meeting you at a hotel where you are not staying is a different picture, since the late hours follow the room rather than the person sitting at the bar.
If a genuinely late finish matters to the plan, the practical answer is to book the room where the evening actually happens, rather than treating a hotel bar as a stop on the way to somewhere you are not staying at all.
The bars built to be lingered in
A handful of West End addresses lean into this properly rather than merely benefiting from it. The American Bar at The Savoy keeps its low lighting and its cocktail list going long after Theatreland has emptied. The Connaught Bar and its quieter sibling the Coburg, both inside the same Mayfair building, do the same with a shorter, sharper list built for exactly this hour.
The Blue Bar at the Berkeley and the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz both hold a similar late crowd of guests who simply never felt the need to go anywhere else once the evening had already found its room. None of these bars advertises the fact loudly, since regulars already know and new guests find out the first time they try ordering at midnight and nobody blinks.
The City goes quiet earlier
The same courtesy applies just as much in the City of London, but far fewer people are staying the night there to make use of it. Square Mile hotel bars tend to empty with the last of the office crowd, since a district built for banking hours has little reason to keep a bar loud once the desks are dark.
A guest wanting a genuinely late finish east of the centre usually finds the room itself, rather than the downstairs bar, is where the evening quietly continues once the ground floor has gone still for the night.
Starting there, or ending there
A late hotel bar works as the first stop of a night out, a proper seat with a drink before the rest of the evening begins, or as the last one, a quiet cocktail once everything else around it has already closed. Molly treats the courtyard bar at Ham Yard exactly this way, arriving around ten once Soho's smaller rooms start to thin out and staying until the night finds its own natural end.
Violetta prefers the opposite shape, a late dinner first and a last, dry drink somewhere quiet once the rest of the West End has gone home for the night. Either order works, since the bar itself rarely minds which end of the evening it is asked to hold.
Booking around last orders
None of this changes what an evening costs. A drink downstairs sits inside whichever length is booked, from £250 for the first hour on the rates board, and a night that runs past midnight is priced exactly as it would be at nine. The desk reads messages through the night, so asking at eleven for company from midnight is treated no differently from asking at noon for company at eight.
Tell the desk the hotel and roughly how late the evening is expected to run, and the reply confirms whether that particular bar keeps late hours for its own guests or closes with everyone else on the street. A booking that already runs past midnight rarely needs any special mention at all, since the desk answers messages through the night as a matter of course, not as an exception made for one particular evening.
Quick answers
No. The late hours apply to a hotel's own registered guests, a courtesy for people staying there, not an all night opening for the public bar downstairs.
Most bars simply know their own guests by room number or a key card left on the table. It is rarely a formal check, more a habit the staff already have.
The bar tab is yours as host, the same as at any hour, and has nothing to do with the companion booking, which runs on the ordinary rate board.
Plenty do close with the street outside. In that case the evening simply continues in the room, which was always going to happen eventually anyway.
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