You queue, you sit at the counter, and you watch the food being made – and the constraint is what makes it work
Barrafina on Dean Street holds a 4.5 from three thousand and thirty-six people, charges forty to ninety pounds, and will not take a booking.
You queue. There is no other route in.
Why they do it
Because a booking system is a promise, and a promise creates an obligation, and an obligation ruins a counter.
If a table is booked for eight, then at half past seven that table must be empty and waiting – which means that for thirty minutes a seat in the busiest restaurant in Soho is sitting there doing nothing, and if the booking is late it does nothing for longer, and if the booking does not come at all then it has done nothing all evening.
A no-booking counter has none of that. Somebody stands up, somebody sits down, and the seat is never cold.
And the consequence, which is the actual product, is that the kitchen is cooking to order for the person in front of it, continuously, all night, with no schedule to hit and no table waiting.
The counter
Which is the correct way to eat and which the British have resisted for a century.
You sit at a bar. The kitchen is on the other side of it. You can see everything – the grill, the plancha, the plating – and the cook can see you.
Which means the cook is being watched, all night, by the person eating the food, and there is nowhere to hide and no pass to hide behind.
We have found this in five postcodes: the best seat in every restaurant in this survey is the counter, and almost nobody takes it, because the British have decided that a table is superior and a stool is a compromise.
It is the reverse. The counter is the good seat. The table is where they put you.
The self-imposed constraint
Which we have now catalogued three times and which always turns out to be the reason the place is good.
The 10 Cases, in Covent Garden, buys ten cases of a wine and then never buys it again – which means it can buy from producers too small to supply anybody else.
Lady of the Grapes stocks only wine made by women.
And Barrafina will not take your booking.
Every one of these is a deliberate limitation that costs the business money and makes the product better, and every one of them is running at the top of its category.
The food
Spanish, superb, and expensive. The tortilla is the test and it is passed. Order the pluma iberica and whatever is on the specials board, which is where the kitchen puts what it actually wants to cook.
Verdict
Excellent. Go at five. Go alone if you can – a single person at a counter gets seated in about four minutes, and a party of four will wait an hour, and that is the arithmetic and nobody will tell you.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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