London Institution St. John Will Reopen With a No-Show Fee

Seminal London restaurant St. John will reopen with a no-show fee of £20 per diner, as co-owners Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver acknowledge that even a restaurant with its reputation is not immune to customers not turning up. The Clerkenwell restaurant, and its sibling in Spitalfields, St. John Bread and Wine, will reopen on 29 July, according to Bloomberg’s Richard Vines.

Gulliver said that “It’ll be great to fire up the stoves and to put good things on the plate once more. The ‘no-shows’ experience of many already is not acceptable. One pandemic is enough! Hence the charge.”

His comments come in the context of a number of London restaurants posting messages on social media in recent days, with various degrees of both anger and actual fixing of the problem. North London restaurant group that consists of Jolene in Newington Green, Primeur in Highbury, and Westerns Laundry in Holloway announced that it was raising its no-show charge to £50; TV chef Tom Kerridge, meanwhile, posted a picture of a soldier from 300 and labelled customers “disgraceful, shortsighted and down right unhelpful,” as well as “selfish.”

No-show discourse is not new, even if it has been exacerbated by anxiety over a future in which dining is restricted by COVID-19. But even in this new context, the arguments aren’t really changing: take a fee — but most won’t — because customers are selfish — that simply isn’t the only thing at play. This lays out one of the kinks of the no-show issue: while the “restaurant industry” unilaterally recognises it as a socially unacceptable ill, it remains divided on what to actually do about it.

Booking for St. John opens from Friday 17 July.