Why Our Prices Are Real
What we found when we checked our prices against the restaurants' own, what we changed, and what a price on our pages means now.
A price on a Travault page is a promise: this is what the room will ask of you. In September we checked that promise on every published venue page, and too often we could not keep it.
A price counts only if the venue printed it.
What we found
Of the 316 venue pages we had published, 205 carried at least one price with no basis in anything we had researched: 617 figures in all. Most of them were our own arithmetic. Two in every three were one end of a per-head range, our estimate of what a dinner would come to, written as though the room had printed it.
What we changed
A price now counts only if the venue's own site or its official booking page prints it, and we record the page and the date we read it. A price found anywhere else, in a review, a listing or a search summary, can send us to the venue's page, but it cannot go on ours.
The price must also belong to the thing it sits beside. A figure a menu prints for a cocktail cannot be moved onto a sandwich because the numbers match, and a deposit or a cancellation charge counts only where the venue prints it as one.
We work out a total only from figures the venue publishes and the tax rules where it trades. In France, the printed menu price must include tax and service by law, so a French price is already the total. Where a venue does not state its tax or service rate, we print no total.
Where a price cannot be confirmed, the page says so: "Price not confirmed", or that the venue does not publish prices and you should confirm when booking. No number is better than a wrong one.
Three pages we got wrong
At Le Cinq, we had put dinner at €590 to €620 a head with wine and service. The restaurant's own page prints its tasting menu, the Epicurean Escape, at €640 before drinks, with service included.
At L'Arpège, we had lunch at €175 and dinner at €420 to €480. Alain Passard's own menus print lunch at €260 and dinner at €380, net, service included. We were wrong in both directions.
At Le Bernardin, we had the four-course prix fixe at $218. The restaurant's dinner menu prints $225.
Each of these restaurants prints its prices on its own page. The errors were ours, and each page now carries the venue's own figures.
What you can rely on now
A venue page cannot be published with a price that fails this check, and a published page that starts failing it is flagged for review. Of our 344 published venue pages, 343 pass it today; the last is waiting until its menu can be read cleanly.
Menus change, and a price we read in September may not be the price in March. That is why we record when we read it, and why the booking line is still the last thing to check before you go.