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Daily Mail
24-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
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.
Telegraph
01-03-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
The fed-up restaurants charging £50 per cancellation
It used to be so simple: ring up a restaurant, pick a time and show up on the night. The suggestion that you should have to pay in advance, let alone hand over upwards of £50, would have been laughable. How things change. A growing number of upmarket restaurants are now charging their customers before they've even set foot in the doorway. At Piraña, a Japanese Peruvian restaurant in Mayfair, diners now have to agree to spend a minimum of £95 on food between Tuesday and Sunday. Fail to show up for a booking, and you'll be fined £50. It's a similar story at Gymkhana, the two Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in Mayfair, which recently introduced a £100 minimum spend. Other examples include the high end sushi restaurant The Araki, where diners must pay a £310 fee in advance for its omakase tasting menu. An evening meal at Claridge's Foyer & Reading Room, meanwhile, comes with a minimum spend of £50 per person. These are, admittedly, extreme examples of restaurants that cater to the wealthiest diners. However, up-front fees for reservations are increasingly common in restaurants – particularly in London. Many are imposing steep cancellation fees on customers if they don't show up, or if they cancel but fail to give enough notice, while others now ask for a deposit to ensure diners stay committed to the booking. 'The costs have gone up, and so you've absolutely got to lock it in,' says Chris D'Sylva, the owner of the Michelin-starred Dorian restaurant in Notting Hill, which charges a £25 deposit per head that is then subtracted from the final bill. Fresh shock from Reeves Restaurants have battled with the surging cost of everything from food to energy in recent years as the industry navigated Brexit, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis. Yet just as many costs were beginning to stabilise, Rachel Reeves has hammered the sector with a fresh shock. In her Budget last October, the Chancellor announced a rise in employers' National Insurance (NI) contributions and a fall in the earnings threshold at which it kicks in. At the same time, minimum wage is set to jump by an inflation-busting 6.7pc. Changes take effect from April. Bosses argue the changes will disproportionately hurt hospitality because of the sheer number of part time staff in the sector. The tax rise has already caused companies to slow or pause hiring and cancel investments. The number of people employed in accommodation and food services has begun to fall since the Budget, dropping by 58,000 in January 2025 compared with the same period last year. Only 14pc of hospitality leaders said they felt optimistic about the sector's prospects in the year ahead, according to a survey by data firm CGA. 'Many consumers remain hesitant about their spending, and while inflation has eased in some areas, business costs remain very high across the sector ... Energy price rises and the Government's planned changes to National Insurance thresholds and rates could hardly be coming at a worse time,' says Karl Chessell, director of hospitality operators and food at CGA. Responding to these higher costs may seen counter intuitive. Many diners might find the suggestion that they should lay down money in advance dispiriting, let alone the prospect of calculating who owes what after a large group meal and several glasses of wine have been knocked back. 'Painful' decisions Yet, restaurant owners say these measures are necessary after years of soaring costs and economic chaos that have made it much harder to turn a profit. 'They're hesitant to do it,' says Nick Gross, a hospitality industry consultant who works with restaurateurs. 'It is quite painful to charge someone £50 a head to not sit in your restaurant. It's all about revenue protection. If I didn't sell it today, that that seat is lost.' Chris Galvin, the co-owner of Galvin Restaurants, charges a £50 cancellation fee per person at his Michelin-starred London site, Galvin La Chapelle, if a cancellation is not made within 48 hours of the meal. 'I think people were [previously] afraid to offend customers, but everyone is on this bloody precipice, worried about business and counting every single cover,' he says. 'Why should it be that we're spending a lot of time securing the best, making sure we prepare it by hand, we rota in the staff, we're paying rent and we're turning down other bookings, and then people don't show?' Of course, no-shows are not a new problem for hospitality. Restaurateurs have spent decades scratching their heads over how to handle the problem. But the precarious financial position that many now find themselves in means a more rigorous approach to the issue is needed. Sunitha Southern, the owner of Kira restaurant in Cheshire, now charges customers deposits for meals on special occasions and holidays like Valentine's Day to protect her income. 'We had situations when people didn't turn up, and we had turned people away,' she says. 'It's c--p, everything is affected if they don't turn up. As soon as you open the door, you walk through, the electricity starts ticking. 'Then your staff are lined up – it's such a competitive market that if you don't give them the shifts you have promised, they will just go and they will get picked by somebody else.' She chose to charge a deposit because after the frequency of no-shows increased in the wake of the pandemic. Southern blames online booking systems, arguing they have made booking a table so easy people feel like it is less of a commitment. 'They will say 'oh, sorry, we have double booked' or 'my partner's booked another restaurant' – and this will be when we call them. It is the most frustrating thing,' she says. While he does charge a deposit, D'Sylva of Dorian says he makes exemptions for regulars and locals who he trusts. 'They don't pay the deposit, but they know how to behave: they honour their reservations, or they cancel them with appropriate time – everyone else, I will put them on £25 per person to keep them committed to the booking. 'We used to have a cancellation fee, but with [payment apps] Monzo, Revolut and all that, it's all two-step payment approval. They don't show up, you go to charge them and you can't – they reject the payments.' As well as no-shows, the fee has managed to put off those who 'reservation squat', where people book several restaurants for the same evening to allow them the option to choose on the night. While his upfront charge has been a success, D'Sylva worries the industry is going down a dangerous path. 'It's in conflict with hospitality. It's not welcoming, it's like 'let's talk about the money first, before I've delivered you anything' – that's not what I want to feel from the outset when I come to a restaurant.'
