The unfortunate vicious circle of the season’s last week

My certainties are more focused on the hospitality industry: I am extremely certain, for example, that when a hotel or restaurant says it stops taking orders at a particular time, that is the time at which it should stop taking orders, and it is an act of incomprehensible perversity to actually stop taking them 8-15 minutes earlier than that.



I mean it: incomprehensible perversity. It really is like cutting your nose off to spite your face, except that basically never happens, and if it does the person involved gets sectioned, whereas this happens a lot. I’m not saying restaurants shouldn’t stop taking orders as early as they like. I just think that the time they do that and the time they say they’re going to do that – whether it’s 9pm, 3pm or 75 seconds after they’ve opened – should be identical.



And I’m irritated by references to “the kitchen” having shut, as if “the kitchen” is an untamable force of nature – like fog at an airport or Terry Wogan’s back, a capricious phenomenon we’re all afflicted by – rather than just another part of the restaurant. Why would the kitchen unilaterally close before the time agreed with the other rooms, leaving them a pointless husk, just a relatively uncomfortable place to sit, full of people remembering the good times when food used to be available?



It irks me because I suspect it to be an attempt to draw me in to the whole restaurant-planning operation. So the time cited as “last food orders” is actually when they’re hoping to close the kitchen – get the ovens cooling, empty the dishwashers – because obviously the chef wants to get off home at a decent time. Much as I respect his or her aspiration, I resent being involved in these details because a key advantage of a restaurant over cooking your own dinner is that you don’t have to think through the logistics of cooking your own dinner.



If “last orders” isn’t really “last orders”, but “ovens turned off” or “closing the kitchen”, then you might as well just give the time by which everyone who works there is hoping to get to bed, and then customers can calculate backwards from then when estimating their chances of successfully placing an order.