A month to sit out

Ramadan is expected around the middle of February, depending on the sighting, which leaves a small kitchen about six weeks to decide something that usually gets decided by default.

The question is not what the Ramadan offer should be. It is whether this business has a Ramadan at all.

A burger kitchen does not, or not the one everybody plans for. Its food is not what a household breaks a fast with. The first hour after sunset belongs to grills, mixed platters, sweets, and the places that can put a set menu in front of a table of nine. What a burger kitchen has, if it has anything, is the trade after midnight. The second meal. The one people go out for, at eleven or at one in the morning, in a room that is louder at that hour than it will be all year.

That is a real business. It is also a different business. It needs a night shift, a rota nobody has written yet, a kitchen team who are themselves fasting, a delivery radius that behaves differently at one in the morning than at seven in the evening.

The expensive choice is the middle. Open all day for the sake of being open. Thin through the evening, because the evening was never yours. Closed by midnight, because the team has been in since ten. Thirty nights of that pays the rent for nobody and finishes with an exhausted staff going into the days that pay best.

The smallest viable Ramadan is the one the kitchen can hold every night for thirty nights. For some operators that is a late shift and four items. For others it is a sign on the door and a team rested for Eid.