A restaurateur friend of mine, who I shall not name because he has to keep serving these people, rang me recently with a tale of woe.
A couple had arrived at his place at one o’clock on Saturday, ordered a burrata to share, one sea bass, a single glass of picpoul and a jug of tap water, and were still there at ten past five. He knows this precisely because in the intervening hours he had turned every other table in the room twice, sent the kitchen home for its break and started laying up for dinner, and there they still were in the window, gazing at each other across the wreckage of a shared crème brûlée.
Four hours. One fish. There is a term in property law for what they were doing, and it is not lunch.
Which brings me to Jeremy King, the man who gave us The Wolseley, Le Caprice in its pomp and the resurrected Simpson’s in the Strand, and the nearest thing British hospitality has to a reigning monarch. Speaking recently on Andy Coulson’s Crisis What Crisis podcast, King observed that the average dwell time at a table in New York is about an hour and a half. In London it is about two and a half hours. In Dublin it is four and a half, at which point you are no longer dining, you are establishing adverse possession. “We have to adapt to keep the lights on,” he said.
He is right, and the numbers are worse than they sound, because somewhere in the last decade the British diner stopped treating a restaurant table as a service and started treating it as an assured shorthold tenancy. We book for eight o’clock and believe we have exchanged contracts. By the main course we have mentally moved in. By the second flat white we are sitting tenants with full security of tenure, and the waiter hovering with the bill is no longer a professional trying to run a business but a rogue landlord attempting an unlawful eviction. Somewhere in Dublin tonight, a table of four is applying for planning permission.
None of this would matter if the table were not the only thing a restaurant actually sells. The food is the excuse. The real product is a few square feet of warm room, rented out in sittings, and a cover is the most perishable stock on earth. An empty chair at seven o’clock cannot be warehoused and sold on Tuesday. It is gone, like an unsold airline seat, except the aeroplane at least gets to fly somewhere nicer.
And the arithmetic has never been tighter. The cost of living squeeze has trimmed what each of us spends when we do go out. The Ozempic brigade order less and the sober-curious drink less, a shift King is too courteous to complain about, though he notes it shortens nobody’s stay. Brexit hollowed out the kitchens and the sector has been tens of thousands of chefs short ever since. Pile on April’s employer National Insurance rise, the living wage and business rates, a combination I have already accused Reeves and Starmer of aiming squarely at the restaurant trade, and you get licensed venues going dark at more than three a day, the fastest contraction since the pandemic.
Business readers will recognise the underlying disease at once: this is an asset utilisation problem, the same arithmetic that governs airlines and hotels. A plane only earns in the air. A hotel room only earns when someone is asleep in it. A restaurant table only earns while plates are landing on it. The metric the smart operators watch is revenue per available seat hour, and when average dwell stretches from two hours to two and a half, that is a 20 per cent cut in capacity with no strike, no new tax and no closure notice. It is the equivalent of every fifth table being removed from the room by customers who think they are being romantic.
Government will not fix this. Its own entrepreneurship adviser recently declared that Britain does not need any more restaurants, which tells you the cavalry is not coming. But here is the cheering part: the utilisation rate is not controlled by the Treasury. It is controlled by us, the diners.
So if you love your local, book the half six sitting. Order like you mean it. Eat well, eat generously, and then, and this is the crucial innovation, leave. Give the table back. The second sitting is where the margin lives, and the most patriotic thing you can do with a Tuesday evening is have a very good dinner in ninety minutes flat.
As for my friend’s window-table couple, the sea bass was excellent, apparently, and he would be delighted to have them back. Just, next time, on a shorter lease.
