The genius of bottomless brunch

I’m rather fond of the many service stations on the M4, since I am convinced they are all named after Jane Austen characters who never made it into the final drafts of the novels. But as an alternative, west of Lord Chieveley and Lady Membury and just east of Sir Leigh Delamere, you can try the Three Trees Farm Shop & Café just south of Junction 15. There is a bank of four car chargers outside, which is what drew me there.

The farm shop is wonderful, with charming staff, and stocked with the kind of high-margin artisanal goods you can buy as presents for the people you are visiting or, better still, for yourself. Moreover, aside from the omission of kedgeree and omelette Arnold Bennett, the café menu pretty much matched my entry for a fantasy league in café menus, should such a thing ever exist.

I’d love to tell you the food was as good in reality as it was on paper. Unfortunately I never got to find out, because the café had closed at 4 p.m. Why do so many places do this?

I love cafés and tea shops more than restaurants. In restaurants you are obliged to eat according to a strict framework, whereas in cafés you can leave your options open. Halfway through a vat of Assam you can suddenly decide: ‘Sod it, I’ll have a toasted teacake.’ But many cafés have a few annoying quirks. One is giving you two small teapots when you ask for a pot of tea for two; the other irritant is often absurd closing times, shutting on random days of the week, or else restricting menu items to arbitrary times. I once went to a café which shut at 4 p.m. but which refused to serve my daughter beans on toast because it was after 3 p.m.

Wherever possible, I like to escape the tyranny of doing things at a set time. To me there are no three more beautiful words in the English language than ‘all-day breakfast’. Indeed one of the reasons I suspect people like working from home is that you can clean your teeth, shower, shave, etc in any order and at any time you choose.

It cannot escape the notice of café operators that one reason why both chains and immigrant-run businesses do well is that they are open consistently and open late. But this isn’t simply because they sell more stuff later in the day by dint of being open: the reality is more complicated. If you stay open two hours more, even if you sell little in those two extra hours, you will still profit over time, because you will get far more business in your core hours. Firstly people are more confident that you are open: nobody plans to rendezvous in a café where there is a 20 per cent chance it’ll be shut. And no one really enjoys eating in cafés in the hour before closing, because once the staff start ostentatiously delactating the nozzle on the coffee machine, it ruins the vibe. Apparently one trick of people who work in coffee shops is to put one or two chairs upside down on a table 30 minutes before closing time, as if preparing to sweep the floor. ‘No one ever comes in after that, so you can knock off early.’

This is why, if you run a café and want to go home at 4 p.m., it would pay you to let others run the café between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., and let them keep all the profits made in those two hours for themselves. The same goes for days when you are closed. If enough cafés followed this principle, it could add 1 per cent to GDP.

Second only to the Covid vaccine, the greatest discovery made in Britain in the past ten years is the widespread realisation that people really like eating breakfast and brunch foods at any time of the day. Indeed, the award for the most cunning marketing idea of the decade has to be the phrase ‘bottomless brunch’. Without this coinage, anyone who demanded limitless prosecco at 10.30 a.m. would have been considered a raging alcoholic. But brand it as a ‘bottomless brunch’ and it’s absolutely fine.