Everybody at dinner is wearing the same watch

Go to the right sort of dinner and half the wrists at the table carry the same watch. It's a very good watch, which is why so many people bought it, and if they were all collected in a bowl before the starters, the waiter would need the serial numbers to hand them back. We love the other kind of watch, the one a guest leans across the bread basket to ask about, the one that starts a conversation before anybody has ordered. Here are five of our favourites, from brands most of the table will never have heard of.

A Kollokium dial is very hard to stop looking at. The Projekt 01's is a tiny city of 468 little cylinders, each tipped with lume, sitting under a tall domed crystal with no bezel in the way, so the light gets in from every side. The Projekt 02 goes further and turns the dial into a relief map, 67 plates in nine layers, every one painted by hand. Kollokium says a dial takes about six hours to assemble and the plates keep trying to buckle as they go in, and we love that somebody sat there pegging tiny painted plates into place for an afternoon so that you could tell the time by a map. The steel case is cast and left rough, so the outside looks as tough as the dial looks delicate. It's made by three people who already worked in watches, and you can tell they were having fun.

Putnik is the most cheerful green we've seen on a wrist. The makers wanted the colour to remind you of a football pitch and a freshly mown lawn, and they got it exactly right: the striped dial and the green ceramic bezel look like the first Saturday of the cricket season. It's clever as well as cheerful. A disc patented by the watchmaker Konstantin Chaykin shows the time in all eleven Russian time zones at once, from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, which will be enormously useful the evening somebody at dinner asks what time it is in Kamchatka. Point the hour hand at the sun and the compass on the bezel will find you north. Only 100 numbered pieces were made, so you're unlikely to meet another one.

Lucky Harvey makes watches that perform. The brand's first watch was a tiger whose eyes move, so the sense of fun is deliberate. Its Chiming Watch 2 strikes, and the hammer and the gong sit right on the front of the dial, so you watch the strike as well as hear it. The hammer is shaped after the bianqing, an ancient Chinese chime instrument from the Han dynasty, and the movement is the brand's own. It's inventive and a little bit theatrical, and once the people around you know it chimes, they will sit there waiting for it.

The Grimoldi G.T.O. is the beauty of the five. Grimoldi has been a family workshop in Milan since 1889, and its own watch, the Gran Tipo Ovale, has an oval case whose curves were drawn from 1960s sports cars. It's a watch that ought to come with a pair of driving gloves. You don't see many oval watches at dinner, which is half the reason to wear one.

Grandeur's Lumillion is the one to wear when the restaurant dims the lights. In the middle of the dial sits a tourbillon, the little rotating cage that carries the balance, and Grandeur made the cage itself glow, which the brand says nobody had done before. It took more than two years, because the lume upset the balance and parts of the movement had to be reworked to put it right. Around it sits a dial of Damascus aluminium, the hours glow round the edge, and you read the time at a single red marker. It's the most inventive watch here, and it was nominated at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève in 2025.