The bag is the dining room

The chairs come off the Riyadh terrace around this week, and they stay stacked until the autumn.

Nobody announces it. The heat does it. From now until October that terrace is a photograph of a season that has ended, and for five months most of what the kitchen sells leaves through the back door in a bag, on the back of a motorbike, to a flat twenty minutes away in traffic.

Which makes the bag the dining room.

Look at what the box is actually being asked to do in June. Hold heat in one compartment and keep it out of another. Stop a bun steaming itself soft. Keep the sauce off the lid. Arrive at a door in a state that lets somebody put it on a plate without editing it first. And say the name of the place on a table where nobody is sitting under its sign, in its light, on its chairs, with its music playing.

Every job the room was doing, the box is now doing alone.

The fit-out gets the money, because the fit-out is the part the owner shows people. Wood, a light fitting brought in from Dubai, a wall that photographs well, misting fans on a terrace that will be unusable by June. The packaging gets whatever the supplier had in a size that fits, chosen on price per thousand, by the same person who also does the rota.

So for most of the year the majority of covers are served in the cheapest thing the business owns, and the minority who sit down are served in the most expensive.

An operator who spends five months decorating a room the customer will not enter has decorated the wrong dining room.