Lillo Montalto Monella investigates the real cost of free meals…
‘Dear customer, please pay what you’d like to pay for the food you’ve just eaten. We won’t charge you on the bill,’ says a notice in one of London restaurants offering a free meal.
It sounds like a highly ambitious utopian idea but London restaurant owners have wised up to the reality: Restaurants simply cannot offer free meals because an unfortunate minority will always take advantage and not pay.
In 2005, national newspapers enthusiastically covered restaurants adopting the pay-what-you-like formula. “The business tactic is proving a success and ‘pay-what-you-like’ restaurants are spreading across Britain”, wrote the Telegraph in June that year. But following a global economic meltdown and five years after French Bistro Just Around The Corner introduced this new philosophy of fair eating, pay-what-you-like restaurants have almost completely faded out.
“Tourists and students started taking advantage of it,” explains Yugoslav restaurateur Peter Ilic, former owner of Just Around the Corner who now runs the Little Bay Restaurant in Farringdon.
Mr. Ilic sold Just Around the Corner in 1997 just before the downturn and now the Finchley-based bistro is out of business. Consequently his current restaurant group, Little Bay Restaurant, has stopped offering food at unfixed prices.
“We did it only for promotion, and it lasted only one month,” he admits. “It was very popular, more than I was expecting actually.”
In fact, figures showed that during that hectic promotional February, each customer was willing to pay an average of £17.25 for his meal, almost 30% more than usual. Then Mr. Ilic realized: “some people started using it to their personal advantage…it started attracting more and more students…I had to stop it.”
Other restaurants, including one called Sweet Melinda in Edinburgh, had to abandon a similar promotional offer. “We started it to get new customers,” Polish manager Vowtick Pankiewicz reveals. “It was a big hit at the time, even though we only did it for food, on special days [Tuesdays] and for tables up to 6 people.”
“We stopped because we used to have quite few regulars…. It worked as long as we got publicity; then we decided to try something new.”
In Germany, where fewer people take advantage of “free meals” the concept seems more viable. In Berlin, a wine-bar chain Weinerei has been promoting free deals for several years. But, as waitress Anna explains, owner Jürgen Stumpf had to adjust the concept a little:
“The deal now is that customers pay a respectful price: there are no fixed prices…. They have to bear in mind that they must spend according to what is fair and respectful.”
In Britain however few restaurants are brave enough to try the “pay-what-you -like” concept, afraid the offer will promote a free for all mentality, where people do not contribute to the cost.
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