24-05-2025
Large reservation deposits and 90-minute timeslots: The sorry state of the UK's fine dining scene
Eating at a Michelin-starred restaurant these days is like going to a premier league relegation football match. You have to fork out huge amounts of money in advance for your seat, it takes ages to get there and then the whole experience lasts just 90 minutes before they start trying to kick you out.
What happened? Why is fine dining suddenly taking lessons from fast food, hustling us from our seats and literally turning the tables on us? The British gastronomic experience used to run on trust and a deliciously freewheeling flexi-time – arrive at 'ish' o'clock, eat like a Roman emperor, stay as long as you want, then leave a big tip if you enjoyed it. Now our enjoyment is being regulated à la Swiss horology and officiously monitored like a German bank account.
These days it starts even before your starters. 'Minimum spend' is a grim and déclassé phrase previously only heard at Las Vegas girly bars and at bottle service VIP areas in glitzy Mayfair nightclubs – it's a low bar set specifically to encourage high rollers and discourage paupers, penny pinchers and riff-raff. But plenty of properly posh nosh houses in London are now insisting on a similar advance and outlay for bookings, days or weeks in advance of your actual dinner. Hutong at The Shard requires diners to spend at least £80 per head on Friday and Saturday nights. Chutney Mary in St James's imposes a £60 per person minimum for dinner. At Mayfair sushi temple The Araki, diners must 'pre-pay' £310 per head on the Tock app for the exclusive dinner omakase experience. Three hundred and ten quid! In advance. Are we eating out or investing in a Ponzi scheme?
With daytime alcohol consumption all but taboo in 2025, the long lunch is under serious threat, too, replaced by ten miserable minutes of takeaway sushi at the computer terminal ('al desko') or a cheerless meal replacement shake in front of a WFH Zoom call.
Tired of no-shows and what the business calls 'reservation squatting' (booking numerous time slots, deposit free, then only turning up for one of them), restaurateurs are now imposing time limits on their dinner tables, too. You go online, book and probably leave your credit card details, only to be informed in plain English – no fancy dressing – that the management is going to need you to be gone within 100 minutes of your reservation time. As it usually takes ten minutes either side of a booking to get in and out of a restaurant, this cuts actual dining time down to 90 minutes.
'Lockdown was the beginning of all this nonsense,' says Mark Hix, a legendary luncher and diner, whose work CV includes kitchen stints at Le Caprice, The Ivy and The Groucho Club, as well as managing his own highly regarded restaurants in London and Lyme Regis.
'That's when everyone got paranoid about time slots and efficiency, when they started making rules and asking for deposits. And when everything went online, people took advantage and started booking tables for six or ten at several different restaurants in one evening and then deciding which one to show up at on the night.'
That does sound annoying, and one does feel the restaurateurs' pain – but an hour and a half! For dinner? Surely I shouldn't have to be clock-watching when I'm supposed to be gorging. When I sit down for nosh I want to decompress. I want to be under the influence of a full-bodied red, not under a time constraint.
The 90-minute dinner-table limit doesn't work because of how a typical restaurant experience tends to pan out. First, you make the reservation, taking into account guests' availability and location, factoring in their various punctuality records. For me, dinner will involve either a single friend, a group of male mates or my two grown-up daughters.
On any and all of these occasions, at least one person (sometimes me) will be late. Sometimes by as much as 25 minutes. And seeing as it's rude to order for yourself in their absence, you wait. Since the clock starts ticking from the reservation time, that's almost a third of the allowance already used up. Factor in cloakroom procedure and pre-dining loo visits, we're really not left with a lot of time.
When everyone has finally arrived, we can order – but with myriad 'dietaries' to deal with and the back-and-forth decisions of the dish-ditherers and the I-haven't-looked-yets, this can eat up another ten minutes. We are now probably down to 60 minutes and with starters delivered to the table, the seconds are ticking away with the neuroticism of the Countdown conundrum clock.
Someone orders the risotto, which is cooked from scratch and takes an extra 20 minutes, so the rest of the table will wait and order more wine. It would be rude to tuck in while their plate is still bare, right? But being well-mannered will also mean that eating, fun, bacchanal and conversation, taste savouring and wine time is now down to around 15 minutes. So let's skip pudding and have a coffee somewhere else. Bill, please! Ironically, this can take an age to arrive, but these wasted minutes, the extra time of the 90 minutes, will not be acknowledged. And guess what? Turns out there's no one waiting for this table anyway so we could have stayed much longer, tried the affogato dessert and consumed more Picpoul. Spent a lot bigger, too.
Oh, to be back in the great expense- account splurge of the 1990s when I was once told off by my boss at a glossy magazine for taking too little time for lunch. 'Simon, lunch is 1pm until at least three,' my superior explained. 'If you are back in the office for two, you just make the rest of us look bad.'
Around the same time, across town in super-smart Fitzrovia, the owner of Michelin-starred Pied à Terre would tell stories of a loyal customer nicknamed 'Timmy Two Lunches' by staff, who would take two tables a day – one at 12 o'clock and another at two o'clock. Two, two-hour lunches in one day! The owner of Ffiona's on Kensington Church Street still gladly recounts how, once, a national newspaper's 90s Christmas party exited her establishment at 7am.
Waiter, can we reverse time and go back to these glory days, please?
Ask a professional bon viveur about the idea of treating dinner as a revved-up amuse-bouche rather than a slow-food main course, clocking restaurant guests in and out like factory workers, and they will choke on their beef-shin ragout. YOU's restaurant critic Tom Parker Bowles, a long-playing record holder for extended fun dining, is refusing to eat anything off this rigorously set menu. 'No decent restaurant would turn its tables like that. It's so rude,' he says. 'It wouldn't happen at The River Cafe, Bellamy's or St John. They would never rush you or kick you out.'
Chef Mark Hix, now living in Dorset and working as a private caterer, believes that two hours is a civilised time for a dinner. 'More if people are drinking a lot of wine.' Sometimes, Hix acknowledges, it'll be the menu, the kitchen, the cooking and cheffing process conspiring to gobble up the precious seconds. 'If a customer orders soufflé, the full roast chicken for two or the kilo porterhouse steak well done? Those dishes are going to take a bit longer – say 40 minutes to an hour longer. Both customer and management have to take that additional time into consideration.'
Side order: I once had a roast chicken dinner with Hix myself. It began at 7pm and ended at 1am. A long time, a very good time, and a long, long time ago, too.
