Monday is the shift the trade would rather forget. Covers are thin, walk-ins thinner, and a good many operators simply lock the door and save the wage bill. L'Escargot — the Georgian grande dame of Greek Street, and London's oldest French restaurant — has decided to do the opposite. In the run-up to its centenary next year, it is making a deliberate play for Monday covers, dressing the slot up as a weekly event it is calling 'Monday Madness.'

The mechanics are textbook, and none the worse for it. First, a reason to come: each Monday brings something a little different — the 'madness' of the billing — to manufacture novelty on a night that usually offers none. Second, a hero offer sharp enough to travel for:

Six Maldon rock oysters and a glass of Joseph Perrier Champagne for £19.27.

The price is the marketing — a nod to 1927, the year it changed its name and moved to its present Greek Street address — and at that number, oysters and real Champagne included, it is plainly a loss-leader, engineered to build a Monday habit rather than a Monday margin.

Third, and most telling, is the distribution, which is candidly stated: convert an outsized online following into actual covers. It is the perennial modern problem in miniature — a restaurant with thousands of followers and a fraction of them ever crossing the threshold — and using a low-risk, high-charm offer to close that gap is about as sensible a use of a social audience as the trade has going.

Underpinning all of it is the anniversary, which lends the whole exercise a narrative and a deadline. A hundredth birthday is a marketing gift most venues never get; L'Escargot, trading on the same Soho site since 1927 under proprietor Brian Clivaz, has a full year to turn the countdown into custom, goodwill and press — of which this is, self-evidently, a part. The £19.27 is the opening move, not the whole campaign.

For the rest of the trade, there is a lesson worth filing. The deadest night on the rota is not a fixed cost to be minimised but an empty stage to be programmed; give people a reason and a price, tell the story well, and even a Monday can be made to work. Whether the oyster crowd stays on for the à la carte is the number that will settle it — but as opening gambits go, £19.27 is hard to argue with.