Why Don't Restaurants Have Clocks?

A deep dive into why you rarely encounter a timepiece ticking away in the dining room (yes, there is a method to the madness)

RESTAURANT DECOR | The deep dive

The Odeon’s iconic clock, one of few exceptions to the unwritten “no clock” rule in dining rooms.

Life serves up many vexing questions. Why am I here? How is the universe both infinite and expanding? Why don’t movie characters ever say goodbye before they hang up the phone? 

We can add one more existential question to that list: why are there never any clocks in restaurants? ‘A-ha!’ you’re probably thinking, ‘I never noticed that before but he’s right.’ No? Still skeptical? Ok, give it some thought. Picture your favorite spot. Picture all your favorite spots. Picture every restaurant you’ve ever been to. Do any of them, in your memory or mind’s eye or however it is you recall stuff, have clocks? By the host stand? By the bar? Front and center in the dining room? I’m guessing the answer is no. 

If my own memory serves me correctly, I cannot recall a single restaurant I’ve ever been to that had a clock, from the Mexican place my family and I frequented nearly once a week when I was a kid to any of my favorite spots these days in the city, fancy or otherwise. 

So what do we chalk this up to? Mere coincidence? A sinister conspiracy? The byproduct of intelligent design whose genius simply eludes us?

TIME IS AN ILLUSION | But you’ve always been here…

“Why are there no clocks in casinos?” Noam Grossman—CEO of Upside Pizza (where you can earn slices on the house and other perks with your free Blackbird membership)—asks me rhetorically. “House usually wins, but not always. Still, the more time I spend in a restaurant the higher the check totals.” 

Cocktails and wine, in other words, are usually the culprits. Noam nods. “Booze. Always booze.” 

“It’s basic restaurant design,” says Michael Hensley of Sant Ambroeus. “The thinking is you don’t want guests concerned with how long they’ve been somewhere. They shouldn’t feel rushed but rather willing to stay.” 

Although the roots of this—how shall we put it?—‘no clocks’ practice remain mysterious, like many things culinary we can probably thank France for it. 

“I think traditionally, i.e. in high-end French restaurants, the idea is to take the outside world out of the equation,” says Aaron Barnett, chef/owner of acclaimed Portland, Oregon spot St. Jack. “I know that in many French restaurants, especially Michelin starred restaurants without a view, they black the windows out as well so there is no passage of time that the guest can perceive. The idea is to take yourself out of reality. Obviously, this doesn’t work anymore but it is definitely a charming old idea, and one that trickled down to lower-tiered restaurants. The idea remains that a meal shared isn’t about time. The server or maître d’ was there to speed up or slow down the guest experience as the guest wanted or as the restaurant needed.”

“In a lot of ways, a restaurant is just a race against time – perishability of food, perishability of a seat. The tension of working in restaurants is predicated on clocks. Time is critical, but you’re trying to make it disappear at the same time for your guests. That’s the magic trick.” - Eli Feldman, owner Shy Bird

Eli Feldman, who owns Shy Bird, an upscale casual restaurant with two locations in Boston, agrees with this take. 

“You don’t want clocks all over your restaurant because you’re trying to create this sense of escape and timelessness,” he tells me over the phone from the floor of one of his spots. “Clocks are a great way to mainline anxiety.” 

Feldman admits that until I contacted him for this story, the lack of clocks in restaurants was a quirky detail he’d never once considered in all his 25 years in the business. And yet, the more and more he thought about it, the more interesting it got. 

“I thought of how ubiquitous clocks actually are in restaurants, just not in the dining room itself.” He laughs. “KDS screens. POS screens. Reservations. The front and back of house are riddled with clocks. They’re constantly in the back of our mind or staring us in the face. In a lot of ways, a restaurant is just a race against time – perishability of food, perishability of a seat. The tension of working in restaurants is predicated on clocks. Time is critical, but you’re trying to make it disappear at the same time for your guests. That’s the magic trick. That’s one of the things that makes this business so hard.” 

The same goes for bars. “The only place where you’re going to see a clock are in bars at the airport,” say Jeffrey Morgenthaler, former manager of seven-time James Beard Award-nominated bar program at Clyde Common, and now the co-owner of Portland’s Pacific Standard cocktail bar. Morgenthaler’s business partner, Benjamin “Banjo” Amberg, more or less agrees, although chalks up exceptions to locale. “I think it also depends on the type of bar and where in the world that bar is located. In Scotland, for example, you go into most any pub and there’s a clock, but you go to a café in Sicily or a cocktail bar in Chicago or SF and there’s nary one to be seen…”

THE ICONOCLASTS | Keepers of the clock

Of course there are more exceptions to this unwritten rule, especially at restaurants here in New York. Noam points out classics like Raoul’s (where he ranks as a regular) and newcomer Jean’s, both of which keep clocks proudly on display. At Raoul’s, one sits right past the bar, above the terminal where the deer head hangs. 

You’ll also find clocks in fine dining rooms further afield, such as culinary capital Lyon. “I know Paul Bocuse has a beautiful old clock in the dining room that I’ve sat under,” says Chef Barnett. “But I was looking at the poulet en vessie not the clock!” 

Perhaps the best example, however, of a restaurant bucking the no clocks trend has to be The Odeon, whose iconic neon pink and green clock hangs behind the bar. It’s such a fixture in the joint that it’s even received a few literary odes, and also features prominently on the tea towels the restaurant sells as merch. The clock’s inclusion in the restaurant’s decor, however, was pure happenstance, as owner Lynn Wagenknecht recounts to me over the phone.

“Keith [McNally] and I were in New Orleans for Jazz Fest. It was 1980 and we’d just signed the lease on The Odeon. We saw the clock propped up in a store window and we went in and asked if it was for sale. It seemed pretty much in keeping with the cafeteria feel – the mirrors, the chrome chairs. We bought it for $25 and took it on the train all the way back to New York.” 

Did she harbor any superstitions when she hung it behind the bar, I wonder. 

“It didn’t even occur to us.” Wagenknecht laughs. “I love clocks. We have one outside of Cafe Cluny, by the entrance. We’re still ticking along.” 

As for clocks making diners feel rushed, Wagenknecht hasn’t seen any evidence of that at The Odeon. 

“We’ve had tables stay for six hours. Sometimes we’ve finally had to offer drinks at the bar to move them along.”  

THE FUTURE | A case for clocks

Given the modern challenges of running a restaurant, however, some people wonder if a clock’s inclusion is merited these days. Are we at the precipice, then, of a paradigm shift? 

“We have helped design and open over 70 restaurants for independent chefs in the last 16 years and not once, ever, did a clock make its way into the final design,” Kurt Huffman, owner of Chef’s Table Group, a Portland, Oregon-based firm that partners with chefs to design, build, and operate restaurants, tells me. “That said, I feel like we should consider integrating clocks into our design. For sit-down, full-service restaurants, one of the top challenges we have is encouraging a faster turn time. In order for us to respect our reservation time for the second group we have to enforce a time limit on the first group. This can get contentious but as the financial pressures have grown on restaurants we have to be more disciplined on matters like this or we can't survive. So maybe clocks need to be part of the design?”

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