The terrace you already paid for

A Gulf terrace is a five-month asset carrying twelve months of rent.

From about November to March it is the best room the restaurant has. Then the heat arrives, which it is doing now, and within a few weeks the outside tables are decoration. Everyone in the business knows this. The lease does not, and the fit-out was paid for once.

That is where the trouble starts, because the fit-out was expensive. The pergola, the flooring, the planting, the outdoor kitchen, the lighting that took three visits to get right. A serious sum went out of the door in the year the place opened, and a serious sum asks to be justified.

So the terrace keeps being programmed into June. Misting fans go in, then the industrial ones, then a quotation arrives for outdoor cooling that costs more per month than the people who work out there. The seasonal offer gets built around the outside tables, because the outside tables are the thing that was invested in. Photography goes on being taken out there at forty-two degrees.

None of that money comes back. The fit-out is spent. It was spent before this summer existed, and no amount of misting recovers a riyal of it.

The only honest way to take the summer decision is to take it as though the terrace were free. Given the heat, almost nobody in the Gulf would choose to open and staff that space in July, or pay to photograph it. Which makes the answer, most years, to close it early, stand the outdoor rota down, stop selling the view, and put the money where the covers actually are between now and September: the kitchen, the packing bench, the driver at the door.

The terrace is not the mistake. Keeping it open to honour an old invoice is.