The ugly truth about beautiful people in restaurants.

Have you ever wondered why, when you’re scoping out a place to eat, every person you see laughing over their salad at the front of a fancy restaurant is inexplicably really, really, ridiculously good-looking?

Turns out it’s not just all those leafy greens they’re eating or your hunger-addled brain playing tricks on you, it’s a strategic choice by restaurateurs to try and entice you into their eateries.

Apparently, restaurants deliberately allocate their best tables to their most attractive clientèle — at least, that’s the theory being tested by a new series Tricks of the Restaurant Trade.

Two of the show’s hosts TV Chef Simon Rimmer and actor Adam Pearson — who suffers from a skin condition known as neurofibromatosis, which means his face is covered in tiny banal tumours — sent a group of objectively pretty okay-looking models into three popular London restaurants to see whether they were given preferential treatment.

Spoiler alert: they were.

While the models were seated front and centre, the hosts repeatedly found themselves relegated to tables near the kitchen and toilets (AKA the crap tables) or, even worse, were told there were no tables at all.

Rimmer, who owns two restaurants himself, said that every restaurant has “a golden table where they sit the best looking customers.”

“A restaurant’s clientèle give off a certain message about the place,” he explained.

“Good-looking customers attract more people and make you more cash so you sit them where they can be seen.”

I mean, it makes sense, who doesn’t love to hob nob with the Hotter Than You Are?

We have a few questions though — how do you decide who makes the cut? Beauty lies, after all, in the eyes of the beholder and what if you give a table to some run-of-the-mill insta-famous hotties and then, say, a group of Victoria’s Secret models show up?

Do you move people?

Owner of London’s Season Kitchen, Neil Gill, who was questioned on the topic by Britain’s The Sun newspaper, had this to say: “Everybody likes to associate themselves with cool people and good looking people.

“You want to feel like you are eating in a restaurant where there are other cool people.”

See, everyone wins. I think I’ve lost my appetite though.