Customers in restaurants are constantly wrong – owners are right to fight back
Hugh Corcoran, the proprietor of The Yellow Bittern, a new spot on the Caledonian Road in King’s Cross, has come out swinging. The place has a number of idiosyncratic qualities, which have caused some to wonder whether it is London’s ‘most eccentric restaurant’. It is only open for lunch, from Monday to Friday. It only accepts cash. You must book over the phone or by postcard. One wall bears a portrait of Lenin, which you rarely see today, even in Islington.
Corcoran took the unusual step of complaining about his customers online, just days after opening. In an Instagram post, he said that it was not worth him going to ‘the effort of dressing the table, of picking and arranging the flowers, of polishing the glasses etc and reserve the table for two hours for someone to order a meal which ends up costing £25 a head’. He added that he expected his customers to ‘at the very least, order correctly, drink some wine, and justify your presence in the room that afternoon’.
He blamed the advent of little sharing plates, which have ‘ruined dining’ or, rather, ‘ruined diners’, training customers to think that it is fine to swerve the traditional starter, main and pudding.
‘Restaurants are not public benches, you are there to spend some money,’ he concluded. ‘And in the case that a plate of radishes is enough for you and your three friends for lunch, then perhaps an allotment would be a better investment than a table at a restaurant.’
He’s had a mixed response. Some, including other restaurateurs, praised him for saying something they felt too but had struggled to articulate. One commenter accused him of being ‘tone deaf’, adding that ‘diners do not owe you anything’. Another suggested, ‘You might be better off just cooking for yourself and not inviting people around.’
It is gratifying to see an ancient debate given a 2024 twist. Clearly the onus is on any business to find a way to function commercially. But that is not the same thing as the customer always being right. Customers in restaurants are constantly wrong, often in bewildering and imaginative ways. Eating out is a language and not everyone is fluent. We cannot blame small plates for everything.
Customers will turn up with three people having booked for five, spend the whole meal on their phones, change their order, lie about what they ordered, fake allergies, claim an allergy that is miraculously cured by pudding, snap their fingers, fail to control their children, drink too much, quibble over the tip, say they are ready to order when they patently aren’t, repeatedly ask for small things – ketchup and mustard – separately, rather than all at once, and ask for the bill to be split between 45. That’s before the infinite ways customers can be wrong about wine: sniffing and slurping interminably, demanding reds are decanted or whites are chilled with liquid nitrogen, sending back perfectly good wines.
Above all, customers are wrong about always thinking they are right. The Yellow Bittern is curiously out of time for a new opening, but its founders should be applauded for fighting back against the merciless steamroller of consumer capitalism. It might not work, but that bloke with a beard on the wall would be proud.