02 Dec BOLD STREET BOOKINGS ANNOUNCEMENT

Since we opened Maray on Bold Street five and a half years ago, many things have changed. The street itself has turned into a hub of great eateries, we’ve opened two more restaurants, Liverpool have been in two champions league finals and there are now officially more mobile phones on earth than humans (it’s true!).

But something else has changed too: a dramatic increase in no-shows.

This isn’t a problem exclusive to Maray. As eating out becomes more and more embedded into people’s social lives, people are booking multiple restaurants and deciding on the day which one they fancy. On any given Saturday service, we will have anything from 20 to 40 no shows (10-20% of our covers for the whole day). For a restaurant with only 36 seats, something needs to change.

So from today we will be walk-in only for groups of less than 6.

We weighed up our options and considered implementing the same system that many other restaurants now employ – holding credit card details for all bookings and charging people for no shows. We thought long and hard about this option as it would cause the least disruption to our operation. But it just doesn’t feel very “us”. We want Maray to be a casual, fun experience, and we felt that taking credit card details for every booking would formalise and sanitise this.

Our other city centre restaurant on the Albert Dock will still take bookings as it is nearly double the size of Bold Street and big enough to cope with no-shows better (please do turn up if you have booked with us there though!).

We have also extended the opening hours of our Bold Street Basement bar where you will be able to grab a drink and a bar snack if you do have to wait for a table. We’ve recently launched our ‘555’ happy hour down there too – 5 drinks, all at £5 from 5-7pm, Thurs-Sat, so get down early doors to take advantage of that!

We hope that you will understand the reasons for this decision. And know that we have wrangled and wrestled with all of our options, and come to the conclusion that this change will allow Bold Street to survive and flourish for another 5 years.

James, Dom & Tom

Co-founders

Maray