Restaurants

A restaurant guest’s evening starts at the booking. The line answered on the third ring or the fifteenth. The system that offered 18:15 and 21:30 and nothing between. The note about an allergy that either reached the pass or quietly did not.

Then two hours in which pacing is the service. The gap before the first drink, the gap between the second course and the third, the plate cleared while somebody at the table is still eating, the table turned politely and the table turned obviously. Almost every complaint a restaurant never hears is a complaint about time.

And then the bill, which is the last thing that happens and is therefore the thing best remembered. What it cost against what it felt like is settled in about ninety seconds, and the goodbye either closes the evening properly or leaves it hanging open.

• Restaurants where the kitchen is beyond question and the room is not.
• Owners who eat in their own restaurant constantly and are never once served the way a stranger is.
• Anyone who has changed a booking system, a menu or a service model and has only heard about it from the floor.

• What booking a table was like, before anybody had cooked anything.
• How the evening was paced, in the order it actually happened.
• What was done with what a guest told you in advance, and where it stopped travelling.
• How the meal ended, and what a guest was still saying about it three days later.