It is a holiday tale designed to court outrage: a tourist in a cafe in Italy has been charged an extra €2 for the privilege of having his sandwich cut in half.
The customer just wanted to share the sandwich with his girlfriend, but when the bill arrived it listed the mysterious service “diviso a metà” at the price of €2. A snapshot of the receipt went viral, prompting Italian newspapers to question the owner of the cafe – Bar Pace by Lake Como – who defended the surcharge. “To cut it in half took us some time, and work must be paid for,” she said.
From there, the basic elements of this story become more iffy. The customer complained – though not at the time – that the sandwich in question was supposed to come cut in half anyway, as a matter of course. The cafe owner, Cristina Biacchi, said it wasn’t just about the halving: “We had to use two plates instead of one and the time to wash them doubled. And then two placemats.”
The outrage, it transpired, was also being served cold: although the story blew up last week, the restaurant receipt was dated 18 June.
It seems odd that Biacchi wasn’t prepared to offer a more obvious justification: that the surcharge is a straightforward penalty for two people sharing one course. If you had a half sandwich on the menu, you would probably charge slightly more for it than half the price of a whole sandwich. If two people tried to beat the system by ordering one sandwich cut in two, you might reasonably try to charge them the full price of two halves – not so much a surcharge as a disincentive.
What, after all, is corkage but a fine for bringing your own wine? Some diners might not appreciate a charge that can easily exceed £20 just for pulling a cork, but then the restaurant doesn’t really approve of customers bringing wine from home when they have booze to sell you. Corkage is their way of saying so.
Likewise, the fashion for taking a credit card deposit along with a restaurant reservation is not mere effrontery. It’s a punishment aimed at people who book tables and then don’t turn up on the night – appalling behaviour that drives restaurants to the wall.
Some practices are harder to defend than others: recent reports that a UK restaurant was charging diners a hefty “live music” surcharge are concerning. I’ve eaten in places where a live music discount would have been advisable. Live music is, after all, the one kind of music you can’t ask the waiter to turn down.
In the US, “concession fees” or “venue fees” – ie charges for absolutely nothing – are sometimes buried at the bottom of restaurant bills in the hope that customers will think they are some kind of local tax. On the other hand, a cover charge – a fee for sitting down – is a pretty reasonable reflection of the fact that a restaurant doesn’t just cook food; it also washes dishes, does laundry, pays staff and maintains licences.
The surcharges that I think are most indefensible are those that are the least enforceable. How many people sitting at an airport Pret a Manger have paid the additional dining-in charge? How many of them even bought their food from Pret?
According to la Repubblica, Biacchi, staunch defender of the €2 fine for a sandwich cleft in twain, also had this to say to her anonymous disgruntled customer: “If you had said something immediately, you would not have paid this supplement. And none of this would have happened.”
This, I cannot support. As someone who has paid countless unreasonable bills in simmering silence, I loathe discounts available only to those who speak up.
