Like eating out on Mondays? You are in luck.
One of London’s leading restaurants will today start pioneering a new pricing model based on the travel industry, with different charges depending on the day of the week and time of your booking.
Bob Bob Ricard, known for a luxurious dining room where each table has a call-button for Champagne, will offer exactly the same menu, only prices are 25 percent lower for off-peak times such as Monday lunch and 15 percent off mid-peak, including dinner on Tuesdays and Sundays. Book for Saturday night and it’s full price.
“The idea just came from looking at how the rest of the world functions,” said owner and founder Leonid Shutov. “Airlines wouldn't be able to exist, the business model wouldn’t work unless you could balance supply and demand. Everything that we have taken that is widely accepted in the modern economy and applied to restaurants, seems to have worked.”
The new pricing model means that if you fancy lobster macaroni & cheese, you may pay £20.50 ($27.70) off peak instead of the usual £26.50. Go for Russian Oscietra caviar and 20 grams could set you back £36 instead of £49.
Other restaurants are watching closely and may follow suit.
“We have talked about this a lot of times over the past 20 years, thinking why aren’t we like airlines or hotels?” said Des Gunewardena, chairman and chief executive of D&D London, which owns about 40 restaurants worldwide and plans to open Bluebird at the Time Warner Center in New York later this year. “We’ve never done it because we have worried our customers might think it is a bit gimmicky.
“It will be interesting to see what their experience is. We might give it a go.”
Shutov said the average spending per customer at Bob Bob Ricard is about £100 per person, and few go there for inexpensive fixed-price lunches. But there is a huge disparity in the numbers of customers throughout the week. There might be 400 diners and a waiting list for tables on a Saturday night but only 40 for lunch on a Monday.
“To stay competitive, we need to be able to serve people a fantastic lunch without charging ridiculous prices,” Shutov said. “And one of the ways of doing that is ensuring a more even occupancy throughout the week so that we are not subsidizing our Monday lunch with a Saturday dinner.”