The tyranny of the restaurant booking system

Last week, the London restaurant St John opened reservations for a celebration of its 30th birthday. For much of September, the Smithfield restaurant will bring back its 1994 menu at 1994 prices. Tables were snatched up within minutes, possibly seconds. I sat at my computer refreshing the OpenTable booking site like a monkey at a slot machine and got nothing but a manic adrenaline rush that ruined my morning.

Please, reader, don’t pity me – it was, of course, just a minor inconvenience. What does wind me up is the principle: fun now has to be meticulously planned and booked weeks in advance. Most of the capital’s restaurants seem to operate on a bookings-only, no-walk-ins-please approach to filling tables, and people have adapted their social lives accordingly.

I can’t quite remember what life was like before the pandemic, but is this not a legacy of that anxious way of living, planning and stockpiling in a way that I thought we agreed made us deeply miserable? We have not returned to normal if we’re pencilling in friends for a one-and-a-half-hour dinner booking four weeks in advance.