After the show

Riyadh's season is opening around now, and every restaurant that is not inside it is about to learn the same thing.

Picture a room built for a Tuesday night. Forty covers, a street the regulars know, families who come out after nine because that is when Riyadh comes out. For the next five months there is a concert on the other side of the city, and the regulars are at it.

The usual way to describe this is that the season raises the price of attention. Media costs more, the feed fills with bigger things, your post is a whisper under a stadium. All true, and the smaller problem.

The larger problem is that the customer is no longer in the neighbourhood. They decided weeks ago, when the tickets went on sale. On a season night a restaurant outside the zone has no evening to compete for. The evening has gone to the show.

No budget a forty-cover restaurant has will make a Tuesday compete with a stadium, and I have sat with enough small operators to know that most try anyway, with a discount and a boosted post that reaches people already in their seats.

What the season does give back is an hour. Every show ends, and it ends all at once: thousands of people leaving together, hungry, in cars, on the same few roads home. Most of the kitchens on their route closed at midnight, because that is when kitchens close.

The smallest viable answer costs almost nothing. A later last order. A driver who knows the roads out of the zone. Three dishes that can be cooked fast at one in the morning, and a sign that says open.

You cannot compete with the season. You can be open when it closes.