Penalizing the Restaurant ‘No-Shows’

Plagued by so-called no-shows--people who reserve tables at restaurants and then neither show up to claim them nor cancel them--a number of restaurateurs in recent years have suggested dealing with the problem by taking credit card numbers to “guarantee” reservations--and then charging a penalty fee for reservations not honored.

Although hotels routinely do precisely this, to the best of my knowledge no restaurant has yet tried the procedure--at least not in the Los Angeles area. But if someone did decide to institute this policy, would it be legal? And would it work?

I asked attorney Manuel S. Klausner for an informal opinion on the matter. Besides practicing law with a major downtown law firm, Klausner, with his wife Willette, is a well-known local foodie and an investor in a number of L.A. area restaurants--among them Chinois on Main, Patina, Duplex and Campanile.

“Off hand,” Klausner told me, “I’d say that such a fee would indeed be legal. A reservation is an implied contract--really, a verbal contract, more than just implied. However, the intention to levy such a fee would have to be expressly communicated. The restaurant would have to tell its customers directly that they would be liable to be charged for not showing up--because doing this isn’t a generally accepted custom in the restaurant industry. And the fee would have to be reasonable. You couldn’t arbitrarily charge somebody, say, $2,000 just because they’d left you with an empty table for the night.”

Klausner added, though, that there might be practical problems with such fee charging: “How late can a customer cancel, for instance? What if I call up at five (minutes) to 8 and say I can’t make my 8 o’clock reservation? Am I liable for the fee or not?

“Another problem is that keeping records and dealing with the inevitable complaints you’d generate by billing all take time and personnel. Maybe the paper work involved in levying a fee would just be too much work for some restaurants. And finally, of course, you’ve got to consider the good-will factor. Sure, the customer did something rude, something wrong, by not canceling. But maybe he’ll come back and spend a lot of money anyway. Do you want to risk alienating him?”

I raised another question with Klausner: If restaurants are going to charge customers who don’t honor reservations, then shouldn’t customers equally be able to charge restaurants which don’t honor them? In other words, what if I arrive on time for my 8 o’clock reservation and am then forced to wait for an hour or more? Shouldn’t any restaurant which is going to charge me for not showing up be willing, in return, to pay me something (or offer me a discount on my meal, when I finally get it) for not having my table ready?

“I think that’s reasonable,” Klausner replied, “though I’m not sure exactly how the mechanics of it would work. If you’re going to charge on one hand, you ought to be prepared to deliver on the other.” Ultimately, he concluded, “What’s really needed is just courtesy and common sense on both sides.”

P.S. Restaurateurs themselves are notoriously bad no-shows when attending out-of-town conventions or trade expositions. At the annual National Restaurant Assn. convention in Chicago a couple of years ago, for instance, several prominent local restaurant owners reported between 25 and 50 no-shows among their fellow restaurateurs on the Saturday night of the convention.

“This is the worst of all the shows for ‘no-shows,’ ” Gene Sage, proprietor of Sage’s and Eugene’s, told Nation’s Restaurant News at the time. “We took the credit card numbers, but we never had the guts to bill.”

JAPAN SAMPLER: By the time the four-month-long Japan Regional Food Products Fair in Little Tokyo’s Weller Court ends in February, you will have had the opportunity to taste the cooking from seven of Japan’s prefectures (state-like regions). This week and next (through Oct. 22), you can explore the food and culture of Japan’s Oita prefecture. On Oct. 28, the regional cuisine of Saltama goes on display for two weeks. Non-eating activities include artisan demonstrations, dance performances and live music showcases.