Restaurant Day

What the day is

Restaurant Day is observed on February 15. It is a food carnival on which anybody opens a restaurant for a single day, in a flat, a garden, a park or a boat, and it began in Helsinki in 2011.

Origin and background

The motive was frustration with regulation. Finnish rules around food service involved permits, inspections and costs that made a small experiment effectively impossible, and the founders' response was to encourage everyone to open a restaurant on the same day regardless, on the reasoning that the authorities could hardly process thousands of simultaneous one-day establishments. It was civil disobedience with soup.

It worked better than protest usually does. The event grew quickly and was held several times a year, spreading to dozens of countries and tens of thousands of participants, and the Finnish city authorities ended up cooperating rather than prosecuting. Helsinki gave it an award. The organizers wound up the centrally coordinated global version in 2016, declaring that the point had been made and handing it to local groups, and it continues in that decentralized form.

The underlying observation is worth keeping. Food is one of the few things almost everyone can make and almost nobody is licensed to sell, and the gap between those two facts is regulatory rather than practical. The rules exist for genuine public health reasons, and they also mean that a person who cooks well but cannot raise capital has no legal route to test whether anybody wants their food.

The pop-up restaurant, the supper club and the food truck all occupy versions of the same territory, and several well-known restaurants began as exactly this kind of one-day experiment.

How to take part

• Open one. A table, one dish and a few hours is the whole format.
• Cook one thing well rather than offering a menu.
• Check what your local rules actually permit, which is often more than people assume.
• Go to somebody else's, which is where the good part is.
• Charge something, even a token, which changes how both sides treat it.