New Year no-show leaves restaurateur ready for action
A Scottish restaurateur is considering taking legal action against a diner who booked a table for seven for New Year's Eve and failed to turn up.
Bill McGuigan, owner of the 28-seat Bank restaurant in Crieff, Perthshire, lost a quarter of his night's trade, worth about £330. He is angry because he was fully booked on the night and turned away potential customers.
He said: "We could have probably filled the no-show table at least four times over with the phone calls we took.
"We didn't take a deposit because we had spoken to them twice in the week and we thought they would come. When they didn't turn up I phoned the chap and told him I had a table waiting for him and he just said "Oh, really?".
He claimed he rang back to cancel but there was no answer. It is rubbish because we were sitting at the phone all night."
McGuigan added: "On the night I said to him I will see you in the small claims court and he laughed and put the phone down."
Some of the UK's top restaurants - including Le Gavroche in London and the Waterside Inn in Bray-on-Thames, Berkshire, both run by the Roux brothers - charge diner's credit cards if large parties fail to show up (Caterer, 13 November 1997, page 9).
