Alex Dilling’s eponymous fine-dining restaurant located in London’s storied Café Royal Hotel announced last week that it would maintain a minimum spend for solo diners reflective of the cost of a dinner for two. At the same time the restaurant announced that the prices for dinner will increase by 11%.

The furore generated around this decision has been considerable, and naturally led to fierce online debate. Following newspaper headlines, Dilling, his co-founder Victoria Sheppard and the Café Royal Hotel all found themselves embroiled in defending their decisions, whilst Twitter mainstays from Hugh Smithson-Wright to Marina O’Loughlin all weighed in.

And so to take a breath (read: cut through the noise) we lay out the issues surrounding solo diners pricing as we understand it. Is it as bad as the Twitterati have made out? Hopefully, we will get it right, but the restaurant has recently felt the need to clarify its original position, via an Instagram post.

Originally a minimum spend seemed to apply to any solo diner. Now, this has been ‘clarified’ (or, as we say in English, ‘changed’) to a position whereby Alex Dilling will hold back one or two tables for solo diners each night (from 17 August this will increase to 3-4 tables when they extend their opening hours). Under the now-clarified rules, only if the solo table allocation is exceeded, will they charge a menu price for two: around £330.

The justification of course is that an individual diner takes the same space as a table of two; and with real estate in the restaurant at a premium (a total of just 11 tables, although this is soon to increase) seating maximum covers matters to the bottom line. For example, two solo diners on two separate tables at current capacity could drop menu revenue for that service by 15-20%.

Business owners of course have every right to deploy reasonable means at their disposal to keep their business afloat. The question is simply if the market will bear them and the extent to which a minimum charge ethos may undercut the notion of hospitality itself. But, minimum spends do occur in other situations. Why not per table?

Some would say having diners, even solo ones, queueing up to eat is a quality problem to have. Is this the best or most imaginative solution in the long term to maximising profit? Time will tell. The Café Royal has set out its stall as is its right. The customers will pay their money and take their choice. Let time tell if this was a good move or not.