The photo is from July

These are the weeks when sitting outside in Riyadh is the best it will be all year, and a good number of kitchens are still advertising an iced coffee.

Open a delivery app now and look only at the photographs. The main image was taken in summer. Condensation down the side of the glass. A drink built around ice. A room shot from the inside, because in July the outside was unusable. Somewhere further down the gallery there is a terrace at midday under white light, which is a picture of the one month nobody would sit there.

The terrace is the best thing the place owns this month. There is no photograph of it in the weather that makes it work.

Nobody decided this. The listing was built once, in the opening fortnight, by whoever had the login, and since then it has been opened only to change a price or switch an item off when the kitchen ran out. The printed menu gets reprinted. The window gets cleaned. The signage gets replaced when a letter goes out. The listing is nobody's job, and it is the only version of the restaurant most of its customers will ever meet.

It is the first thing I check on a small operator now, and not because the photograph is bad. The date on it is a reading on how the business is run. How far the person deciding sits from the person ordering. How long since anyone inside used their own product the way a stranger has to.

That listing is a window onto the busiest street the restaurant will ever stand on. Most of the traffic passes there and nowhere else.

The date on the photograph tells you how long it has been since anyone looked out of it.