Everyone eats at the same minute

In Ramadan every order in the city wants to arrive in the same minute.

Not the same evening. Not the same hour. The minute the fast ends and the family sits down. Food that turns up ten minutes late has missed the entire point of the meal, and everyone involved knows it. Lunch spreads over two hours. Iftar does not spread at all.

So for a restaurant the month is decided by a capacity number rather than a budget: how many orders the kitchen can physically get out of the door in that minute. It is a smaller number than the owner believes, and it is usually discovered on the first night.

The first nights are also where the rating is set. Reviews from nights one, two and three sit on the page for the rest of the month, and the delivery app shows that page to everyone who searches in the hour before sunset for the next four weeks. A kitchen that accepted three hundred orders and landed two hundred of them warm has bought itself a month of paid attention pointing at a bad page.

The ceiling is the number to settle now, while the month is still a few weeks off and settling it costs nothing. Close the slots when they are full. Cut the menu to what can be cooked in parallel. Refuse the order that cannot be there on time, tonight, instead of accepting it and arriving late.

The owner who does that spends the first week saying no to money, which feels like the opposite of marketing.

It is the only thing protecting the twenty-nine nights that the first three are about to sell.