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.
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