It’s a common misconception that anyone who writes about restaurants must be part of the hospitality industry. Traditionally, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Your responsibility as a food writer is always, first and foremost, to the reader. Sure, you owe honesty and fairness to the place you’re writing about, but that’s as much about giving you a true sense of the sort of experience you might have if you decided to go there, and help you to decide if you might want to spend your money there. 

This ‘reader first’ attitude does, however, find us food writers occasionally criticising places when they try new things, like adopting a no-bookings policy or adding spurious extra charges. It can also make us a little tone-deaf when it comes to helping protect the survival of those places we love, and I think there are two areas where we need to be a little bit more supportive to the restaurant industry. Both are things that are often roundly criticised. 

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First up is the charging of a deposit when making a restaurant booking. I have friends who are horrified about having to pay cash upfront to book at a restaurant, yet will happily pay in full when they book a flight, or a ticket to the football or the theatre. So why not restaurants? 

While I don’t think this is justified in large, casual places unless it’s a large group, a table of ‘no-shows’ in a small expensive place – with little chance of walk-ins filling that table – can wipe out a restaurant’s profit for the night. If you feel strongly about using a credit card to secure a reservation, there are always other options… and lots of places won’t charge you if you cancel in good time so they can refill the booking. I’m not sure you’d find other businesses so understanding. If you don’t show up to that flight or night at the theatre, you’d never expect a refund. 

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The other challenge that restaurants and cafes are facing is our desire to customise dishes. Not so much because of allergies, but rather our personal aversions and peccadillos. Now, while it’s an obvious survival strategy for restaurants to have vegan, vegetarian, lactose-free and gluten-free options on the menu, I feel that as customers, we can sometime get piqued at a restaurant’s resistance to customise dishes on demand, especially as we seldom – if ever – offer to pay for these alterations. 

If you were ordering a car or a suit and wanted changes made to the off-the-rack model, you’d expect to pay a little extra, but in restaurants, most of us would baulk at this – even though the impact of varying dishes in a busy kitchen can be a real hassle. But while I think there’d be a riot if restaurants started adding a 20 percent surcharge on menu variations (like removing the pickles in that burger), it stands to reason that we, as customers, should also do our due diligence by checking that the menu is suitable for our personal needs before ordering. 

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