Fixed price, moving cost

The iftar set menu is a number per head, printed, and it cannot move for thirty nights.

Everything under it can.

It was costed weeks ago on the invoices of the time: the soup, the rice, the protein, the four things on the cold table, the juice that goes out free with every cover. Then the month starts, and in Cairo the vegetables reprice weekly and the protein follows them, in the one month of the year when the kitchen buys more food than in any other. The restaurant trades for thirty nights against a number it agreed before it knew the number.

So the set menu becomes the only price in the building that cannot be changed. The ordinary menu can be reprinted on a Tuesday. A delivery fee can move overnight. The set menu is on a table tent, in an app, in a post, in a forwarded photograph, and in the heads of the twelve people who booked for Thursday.

Which means the margin gets managed somewhere no report looks: through the kitchen door.

The portion comes down by a spoon. The garnish goes. The cut changes to a cheaper one carrying the same word on the menu. The free juice arrives as a jug for the table instead of a glass each. The salad grows and the protein shrinks. None of it appears on a price list, all of it is a price change, and it is made by a chef who was handed a number and told to hold it, with nobody deciding it as policy.

The operator who costed the month on its first week is running a discount he never announced, and the depth of it turns up in April, when the invoices get read against the covers.

A fixed price is only fixed on one side of the kitchen door.