The room's real price

On Wednesday night a Gulf venue will price the room instead of the menu, and the customer will pay it without arguing.

That is the whole of New Year's Eve. Nobody is buying dinner. Four courses that go out at a hundred and forty dirhams a head in March leave the same pass at six hundred, cooked by the same section, and everyone in the room understands the arithmetic perfectly well. What is being bought is a place to have been. A photograph with the right thing behind it, sent to the family group before midnight, read by people who will draw their own conclusion about the kind of year it was.

Price the room that way on the thirty-first and there is no resistance at all. Price a good table the same way on a Monday in April and the phone rings with complaints about the food.

The part worth watching is the first of January. The room does not change. The view is the view, the terrace is the terrace, the position on the map is the one the lease was signed for. And the venue goes straight back to selling the menu: a set lunch, a two-course weekday offer, a percentage off the bill before seven.

For one night the room was worth six hundred a head to a few hundred people. It is worth something to the right two hundred people on a Thursday in March as well. Not six hundred, and not the food number either. Almost nobody ever finds out which, because finding out means believing your own room in a month with nothing on the calendar to hide behind.

One night a year this industry prices what it actually sells.