Christmas looms, and that means we’re veering into office party season, that sloshed embittered wasteland of social interaction. Nigel, gazing into his Rioja, dolefully telling his bored neighbour how he wished he’d taken that job in Dubai in ’98. Anne from Accounts gigglingly fumbling with Terry the IT guy’s fly. Secretaries in Santa hats shrieking Noddy Holder. And dropped trousers and camera flashes and panicked hangovers and global emails and cold unsmiling disciplinary hearings. It’s as British as beer, but more bitter.
Restaurants, of course, cash in. The canniest send out flyers as early as September, hoping to snare some very social secretaries and get the bookings going. When I worked in the City, I’d notice ads for Christmas menus more or less when people returned from summer holidays, in the trudging, familiar, eyes-on-the-prize way of office life.
True, you can’t blame the restaurants. Those cheerless company round-robins celebrating ‘a good year in challenging times’ often result in some miserly hand-out to the drones – and, as any MP will tell you, there’s nothing easier than spending your boss’s money. To survive in the business, you have to find any excuse for a mark-up: hence those vast libidinous forests of tables-for-two on 14 February. But I find something rather cynical in the wild inflation of menu prices during the season of goodwill, in the compulsory fixed-priced triple courses, in the coal-scrimping Scrooginess.
At D&D’s Butler’s Wharf Chop House, your typical set lunch is £26. At Christmas, it’s £85. Naturally, you’d expect a bit of inflation: for one thing, the luckless staff deserve some extra cash. But it seems bonkers to levy an increase of 227% over nothing but a date. If you want an all-out blow-out this year, a Crimbo dinner at the Dorchester is a smidgen under £400 per person – plus service.
It’s all so sad and disingenuous. We call it the ‘hospitality’ industry, but these places remain businesses, with margins and accountants and ‘brand experts’ advising them on ‘Twitter strategies’. They may provide a good time, they may nourish us, but they’re as far from the genial, jovial warmth of Yuletide, from relatives and friends supping and wassailing, as it’s possible to be.
What could be more antithetical to the spirit of Christmas than sitting in some hastily-redecorated room to eat food cooked by a sweatily hungover chef, served by hungover waiters with their eyes flicking constantly at their watches? More than this, everyone knows Christmas is really a time for children, and they hate restaurants. Moppets are far happier in McDonald’s or Pizza Express than in hallowed gastrotemples, and it’s a waste of time to expect any different. Christmas is about home, about turning away from starch and sommeliers and eat-all-you-can-eat buffets, and sitting somewhere you pour your own wine and nobody shoves a bill in front of you.
So the only people who use restaurants at Christmas – although, of course, the restaurants are really the ones using them – are: oppressed suit-wearing lightweights; the homeless; divorced dads and their weeping children; people having affairs; and lonely, forgotten Mr Bean types. For the rest of us, I recommend champagne at 10 o’clock, a fat goose, Ratatouille on the telly, and old-fashioned family fisticuffs.