Ninety days on the coast

Egypt's North Coast is opening, and for about ninety days it is a market. Then it is a road with the shutters down.

Every June a set of Cairo restaurants take a unit there. A container on a beach club strip, a kiosk in a compound, a marina food court unit with the season's rent paid up front. The founder calls it the summer branch. What they have actually taken on is the smallest viable version of a second branch, and a better test of the idea than the real thing would be.

Look at what the season gives them for free. A short menu, because the kitchen is a fraction of the Cairo one. A short lease, so the mistake has an end date written into it. A customer with money and time, the two things a Cairo lunch crowd never has together. And a closing date that does the scarcity for free: nobody needs a countdown when the whole coast knows it shuts in September.

A marketer in Cairo would pay for any one of those constraints. Here they come with the unit.

I have watched operators come home from this well and badly, and the difference is what they thought they were doing.

The first group treat the ninety days as a test. Which dishes travel. What a customer with a whole afternoon orders that one with forty minutes does not. Whether the name means anything to someone who has never walked past the original. They write it down, and in September they know four things they did not know in June.

The second group treat it as a party. Full menu, a launch night, a creator with a boat, a fit-out that would embarrass the original. The unit is busy, the founder is on the coast, and in September there is a number nobody wants to look at.

Same ninety days. One of them goes home knowing something. The other goes home with a loss and calls it marketing.