Let People Order Less
The case against minimum spends, and for actual hospitality.
Minimum spend, per person. It’s everywhere now. The clenched jaw on a booking page. A neat little sign on the host stand that says pre‑qualify before we even pour water. The mood is accountant at a birthday party. Everyone smiles, nobody breathes.
Of course, I understand how it happened. Costs are feral. Rents, rates, energy, card fees, delivery platforms that skim the cream, the staffing wobble that never quite steadied. A quiet two‑top nursing martinis at 7.30 can feel like sabotage when there’s a queue outside. The fear is real. I’ve felt it in my ribs while watching a live bookings screen cough and reservations start dropping like flies. But the minimum spend is the wrong tool. It punishes the guest for our anxiety, and anxiety isn’t a management strategy.
Hospitality is a contract. We offer warmth, space, service and food. The guest brings appetite, curiosity and some version of decent behaviour. Add a price floor and you inject shame where there should be ease. It tells the teetotal friend they’re a nuisance. It tells the person between trains that a bowl of soup and a seat aren’t enough. It turns a restaurant into a private members’ club. I don’t want to run that room.
Earlier this year, Jimi Famurewa wrote a sharp piece for The Good Food Guide about how minimum spends squeeze the spirit out of restaurants. In typical Jimi fashion, it was poised and precise.
“I find myself edging towards a kind of moral revulsion at the idea of any kind of minimum spend policy…”
“To my mind, they’ll get a lot further with honey instead of vinegar.”
If honey beats vinegar, Jeremy King shows the recipe, drizzling it from a great height until the room turns golden.
King tells it best. In a story from opening Zédel, he puts it like this:
“I always remember opening Zédel… the management got very upset one day. I arrived, and they were spitting [furious] because…
‘There’s a lady on table 21… she came in, ordered tap water. Eventually, she ordered just a soup—£2.25 at the time. She’d already eaten the bread basket, so we gave her a second bread basket, which she ate with her soup… then she asked for the bill and went on her way.’
And they said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this.’
And I said, ‘Why? It’s brilliant! It’s wonderful—the fact that she feels she can come in here and do that.’
By all means, I said, ‘Go and tell table 31 they can’t have that second bottle of champagne because they’re spending too much…’
It evens out in the end—it really, really evens out.”
That’s the heart of it.
Today soup. Next time breakfast. Then birthdays. We're not in the business of telling people what enough looks like.
Flip the coin. If a table wants oysters, steak, pudding and a magnum, we’re not the fun police. We'll steer away from waste. We won’t ration joy.
As King puts it elsewhere: “give people the opportunity to spend, but do not make it mandatory”.
Opportunity to spend, never obligation.
That’s the blueprint.
Expensive is relative. For some, a fast‑food meal is a once‑a‑year treat. For others, Michelin stars get collected like Panini stickers. What matters at every price point is that a guest leaves feeling their money bought something worthwhile. That’s not just price. That’s value. Value is warmth, pacing, attention, a sense that you were welcome and that the room wanted you there.
I eat out a lot. It’s my main entertainment and it feeds my work. The accountant goes to a tax conference. I go to dinner. Or three. When I visit restaurants, I like the opulence of it. An aperitif to start. Maybe a second bottle of wine. Increasingly, this is hard on the old bank account. These days, any half‑decent restaurant will have you shouting, “Fly, my pretties”, as the moths escape your wallet.
I also skip alcohol a fair bit now. That’s not a betrayal of the cause. It means I can visit more frequently. It means I turn up on quiet Tuesday lunchtimes that might have sat empty.
Sometimes we restaurant‑hop (Dean Street to Lexington Street, a plate of croquettes at Barrafina, then a steamed bun at Bao) because we want a broad sweep of experience. A couple of starters in three or four places across an afternoon. Stingy? Or simply a different agenda?
Here’s the economics behind this. Restaurants like mine don’t make money on a single visit. We live on the third visit and beyond.
The statistics around revisits are quite staggering; even when everything goes right and guests leave happy, the odds of a return visit are slim. In fact, after a flawless first visit the chance of a second sits at about forty per cent. After a flawless second visit the chance of a third is still in the low forties. Nail the third and the likelihood of a fourth jumps to around seventy per cent.
Loyalty is built in familiarity, not with a price floor on visit one.
Chances are you’re not ordering champagne every time you go out; sometimes it’s a plate of buttered hispi and a perfect espresso to finish. Life, like restaurants, has balance. Yes, they can be places of excess; they can also be places of restraint. The person who comes in for a daily coffee might be the same one who books their 40th with ten friends.
The class piece matters. A delivery rider grabbing a quick bowl between drops. A nurse on a late break cradling soup like medicine. Minimum spends punish the careful. They punish the sober. They punish the person saving up for the main event. Some of the most beautiful tables I’ve ever served were quiet, modest and utterly human. A first date on tap water. A widow with a book and a single martini. A lad who just wanted chips after a rubbish shift. If that makes your spreadsheet twitch, maybe you don’t love restaurants.
And despite the lazy assumptions people make about socioeconomic background based on the price of the menu or the ambience, restaurants should, at their heart, be free of class. Walk through the door and you should be treated exactly the same as every other guest. To enforce a minimum spend is to fly in the face of that egalitarian ideal. It’s to forgo any sense of service or hospitality.
I’m not naïve. Some will occupy a four‑top with two iced waters and a thousand‑yard stare. That’s a hosting problem, not a pricing problem. Move with grace. Offer the bar or the sunny table that is about to free up. Most people meet hospitality with hospitality right back. That’s the alchemy that keeps a room alive.
Restaurants are public living rooms with fire and knives. We keep the lights on by selling food and drink, yes, but the engine is trust. Trust the guest to be decent. Trust your team to be brave and kind. Trust the long game.
Minimum spends feel like control. Hospitality happens when you let go a bit.
What’s the smallest, most beautiful order you’ve served or enjoyed? Drop it in the comments; I’ll read every one.
I hope that a tax conference isn’t anyone’s idea of fun, but who am I to kink shame?
Yes yes yes, agree so hard with this. Minimal spends are grating to the customer, especially where they are so structured that if I don't want to order a starter, main, dessert and more, I am clearly not welcome!
And as you say, surely for many restaurants the visits where customers minimise spend are balanced out by the visits where customers order to excess! I appreciate that, on a purely monetary basis, it would hard for many restaurants to support too many of the minimal orderers against too few of the big spenders. But is that really a genuine issue for most places? Or have they put the minimim order in because they think they should, rather than because they actually need to?
As you've identified, often those customers who feel comfortable that they are welcomed even when they order only a little become regulars and choose to also come to their welcoming space when they want to celebrate and spend more.
I have always loved restaurants where I can become a regular, where staff get to know me, and it doesn't matter whether I go in (usually at quiet times) for one soft drink and a starter, or whether I'm there with friends in tow ordering with gay abandon. That, to me, is the kind of place I am grateful for and will always be loyal to!