It is at every table. It works. And it is the single most effective piece of restaurant design in this city.
Bob Bob Ricard holds a 4.4 from three thousand three hundred and nineteen people, charges over a hundred pounds a head, and has a button on every table.
The button says PRESS FOR CHAMPAGNE.
You press it. A light comes on. Somebody brings champagne.
Why it works
Because it removes the worst moment in fine dining, which is asking.
The Prat has spent five hundred and forty-two articles establishing that ratings are destroyed not by the food but by the ninety seconds before it arrives – by the wait, by the door, by the moment somebody was not looked at.
And the single most uncomfortable interaction in an expensive restaurant is the one where you have decided you want more champagne and you must now attract the attention of a person who is not looking at you, in a quiet room, without waving.
The English, in particular, would rather go thirsty. It is a documented national characteristic and it costs the hospitality industry a fortune.
The button abolishes it. You do not have to catch anybody’s eye. You do not have to raise a hand. You press a small brass thing and the problem is solved.
The commercial genius of it
Which is obvious the moment you say it out loud.
Champagne is one of the highest-margin items in any restaurant. And the barrier to selling a second bottle is not price, and it is not desire.
It is friction.
Remove the friction and the second bottle sells itself – and Bob Bob Ricard is reported to sell champagne at a rate that startles other restaurateurs, and the button is the entire reason.
The Prat’s commercial desk regards this as the best-designed object in London hospitality and notes that it cost a few pounds to install.
The booths
Which are the other half of it.
Every seat is a booth. There is no floor of tables, no open room, and no sightline from your table to anybody else’s.
Which means you cannot be seen, and cannot see – and the entire anxiety of an expensive restaurant, which is being watched by other diners, evaporates.
A booth is a private room that costs the space of a table. It is the oldest trick in the business and almost nobody does it, because booths are less efficient than tables and the accountants win.
The blue and gold
It is decorated like a first-class railway carriage crossed with an Art Deco liner, and it is completely, gloriously unembarrassed.
Verdict
Very expensive. Very good. And a button.
Press it. That is what it is for, and there is not a person alive who has sat at that table and not pressed it.
The lesson nobody has taken
Which is the point of the article and which the whole trade has watched and ignored.
Every restaurant in London has the same problem. The customer wants more and will not ask. And the industry’s answer, universally, is to tell the waiting staff to check back – which is worse, because it is an interruption, and it happens at the wrong moment, and the answer is almost always no because the customer has been caught mid-sentence.
The button solves it from the other end. It puts the request in the customer’s hands and removes every social cost from making it.
It cost a few pounds. Nobody has copied it.
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]
Dialogue accuracy transcribed.