No reservations: how to get more from eating out

It is 30 years since the FT launched Lunch for a Fiver, the restaurant promotion in which 150 restaurants offered a two-course lunch for £5. It was a huge success, filling the participating restaurants during a recession and generating a great deal of goodwill among everybody who took part.

Today, the impact of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and rising energy, labour and food costs have forced many UK restaurants to close. Customers are similarly challenged. Inflation, rising bills and strikes are contributing to a general feeling of uncertainty. One chef told me, “Our customers seem confused, buffeted as it were by a series of bad news stories.”

This is taking place, however, against a situation to which many restaurateurs and chefs have already responded sensibly. Many have decided to work with shorter menus, cutting out extraneous ingredients that proved too costly. Many have decided to close on Mondays which allows them to concentrate on busier, more profitable times of the week. The culmination of this is that the quality of the cooking and the friendliness of the service has never been higher.

But the extent of what an individual restaurateur can do to explain all this, to boost business, is limited. I have a suggestion. It is an initiative without any restrictions, and without any time limits.

This initiative follows a strategy I have now tried three times recently with great success. And, if my reading of the state of the British economy is correct — and the depressing impact this will have on London’s restaurants is as predicted — then I will probably be able to continue this regime for a good while longer. It is this: not to book a table in advance but just to turn up. To become a casual “walk-in”.

The first of my three recent London experiences was when we were walking back to King’s Cross early one evening and decided to try our luck at Supawan, a favourite Thai restaurant on the Caledonian Road. I remember a feeling of slight nervousness as we stood by the receptionist and explained that we did not have a reservation. And then I recall her smiling at us and saying the magic words, “Of course. Please follow me,” which we did and were seated at a table with a view.

We ate and drank well. But I felt that there was something more that we had done well. We had won, in a fashion. We had got into the restaurant, at a time that suited us. We had been made very welcome. And we had a good time.

Part of the pleasure lay in not having to battle with any online reservation system. Please don’t get me wrong. I like them and, as someone who spends most of his working day at a laptop, I admire their convenience. If I were still a restaurateur, I would definitely use one. But I dislike their lack of flexibility compared to the pen and paper system (I recall a receptionist at a very popular New York restaurant 20 years ago telling me that doing his job was “like playing three dimensional chess”). With online systems, too often the most popular booking times are routinely blocked off when in reality they are not actually booked.

At the new St John in Marylebone I tried to book for 1.30pm but was told there were no tables available. I was allowed to book for 2pm but turned up early, just after 1.30pm, expecting to wait. But there were several tables available, including ours, where we enjoyed the famous St John minimal experience. Deep-fried, very cheesy rarebit followed by Eccles cake with Lancashire cheese made for a satisfying Saturday lunch.

The third highly enjoyable meal as a walk-in was at the recently opened Honey & Co on Lamb’s Conduit Street, where I had tried and failed to book online a few weeks earlier. En route from a wine tasting to the nearby Curzon cinema we wandered down the street initially planning to go to Noble Rot opposite. But the opportunity to try somewhere new beckoned and we walked in — to the same, extremely warm welcome and the same standard of good food and interesting wine as the original Honey & Co in Warren Street.

This is a practice I intend to continue over the coming months, a time when no one, either in retail or hospitality, is too confident of demand. The small silver lining for UK restaurateurs is that the relatively weak pound should, at least, continue to make London, and the rest of the country, attractive to overseas visitors. (The seven-course menu exceptional at the Waterside Inn in Bray, for instance, is priced at £235, or €270; a similar menu at Maison Troisgros in Ouches, south-east France costs €340. Both restaurants have three stars in the Michelin Guide.)

There is one other additional factor to be considered. Over the past 15 years, the number of restaurants of every description in the UK has increased significantly as hospitality, in the broadest sense of the term, was initially seen as an adjunct to retail. But more recently, as retail has faltered under the effect of first online shopping and then Covid-19, hospitality has been seen as a replacement for failing retail.

Consequently, a large number of what were once retail spaces have been converted by their landlords into spaces that can accommodate hospitality. The biggest and most obvious challenge in doing this is installation of the extraction system required by a busy kitchen, but numerous landlords in major cities have put up the required capital to allow for this change of use. As a result, there are now far more potential restaurant seats available.

They are available to everyone, but in particular for anyone, like me, who cares to “walk in” — without a reservation.

More articles from Nicholas Lander at ft.com/lander

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Allow yourself to dream for a moment: if you could ‘walk in’ to any restaurant on the planet which would it be and why? Let us know in the comments below