If you logged onto Rockpool’s online reservation system on Wednesday morning last week, you would have found a number of tables available for lunch and dinner over the next seven weeks.

If you logged on later that evening, however, you would have found your options severely curtailed.

The reason? The announcement that the 27-year-old institution was closing its doors and rebranding itself as the more casual Eleven Bridge.

“The phones started ringing almost immediately,” Rockpool general manager Jeremy Courmadias said. “Friday and Saturday nights are pretty much full before we close on July 30. We still have tables for Monday and Tuesday lunches, but they’re filling fast.”

A recent spate of announced closures has resulted in parallel spate of bookings. Rockpool’s experience has been echoed at Surry Hills restaurants Marque and MoVida, which have seen their bookings spike since they announced they were shutting up shop. (Andrew McConnell, who last week announced he was closing Melbourne’s Moon Under Water and opening a Chinese restaurant in its place, is currently overseas and was unavailable for comment.)

“Closing is very good for business,” Marque chef and owner Mark Best said. “You build up a lot of goodwill over 17 years and people have a lot of good memories that they want to relive with you one last time.”

“Marque was always a restaurant for special occasions and a lot of people are coming back to experience, not just the food, but those memories.”

Best announced the Surry Hills restaurant’s closure last month. Only a handful of tables remain before the final “alumni dinner” on June 30.

MoVida Sydney administration manager Louisa Biviano said the Surry Hills outpost of the popular Melbourne tapas empire had seen “a big increase” in bookings after its June 29 closure was announced last Thursday.

“The majority of the calls were customers wanting to book in before we closed,” she said.

Was there any sense of disappointment – or of ironic bemusement – at the fact that low customer turnover had played a role in the decision to close the restaurant and was now likely to improve because of that decision?

“Neither really,” Biviano said. “I think that’s just how it goes.”

“Closing down sales are always very successful, aren’t they? It’s the same thing really.”