Here until March

Riyadh in these months is a city being rented by the quarter.

A restaurant from somewhere else takes a space for the season. Three months, sometimes four, with the end date announced at the opening, which no ordinary restaurant would ever do. A name people already know from a city with a longer queue, a menu flown in more or less intact, a room built to be photographed, and a price that assumes the customer is on a night out rather than having dinner. It opens in the best weather of the year, it is fully booked at the weekend, it becomes the answer to every question about where to go, and around the time the season winds down it packs up.

The operator two streets away spends all of it being compared to a business that will not be here in the summer.

I have watched operators answer that the wrong way. They match the price without the name that justified it. They redecorate. They decide the market has moved upmarket and reprice a menu they will have to walk back by June. Being better than the visitor is not the job on offer. The visitor was never trying to be a restaurant in this city.

What the pop-up is actually doing is borrowing the season's attention and taking it home. It carries no rent in July, no team to hold together through the empty months, no reputation here to protect, and no reason to care what a regular thinks in the second year.

What it leaves behind is a customer who has been taught, over three months, what an evening in this category is worth. That is the only thing worth accepting from it. The operator still here in August inherits the price expectation and not the competitor.