Prison restaurant run by inmates costs £150-a-head Members of the public who want to book a table have to be searched before entering the category B jail which houses 780 inmates. They are made to hand over mobile phones at the door and are warned they should not carry more than £50 cash. Customers at the Clink, which seats up to 100 diners, enjoy three-course meals at just £18.75. But porridge is off the menu - with the scheme backed by award-winning chef Alberto Crisci who has worked at Marco Pierre White's Mirabelle Restaurant in Mayfair, London. But by the middle of January only 2,500 customers had visited The Clink - a return on tax payers' money of around £150 per diner. Chris Moore, chief executive of The Clink Charity which runs the prison, said: "I can confirm that The Clink Cymru currently operates at a loss. This is due to the nature of the training and continued mentoring which is key to the success of the rehabilitation programme. The charity, which runs another prison restaurant in Surrey, pay prisoners - who are of the second highest security grade - £15 for a five-day working week. The criminals serving haute cuisine using Welsh produce grown at an organic farm at another nearby prison. Opening hours will be limited to between 12pm and 2.30pm and there will be a manned 24 hour CCTV and alarm system. Cardiff Central Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Willott has the prison in her constituency. She said: "I appreciate that £362,000 is a lot of money and I am glad that Cardiff Prison's spending decisions are being scrutinised. But when you bear in mind that it costs around £40,000 per year to keep someone in prison. It doesn't take long to recover the costs of creating The Clink if it means that prisoners are helped out of the reoffending cycle. The restaurant is run as a separate charity and the taxpayer is not responsible for running costs. Prison is about paying your debt to society, but it also needs to be about helping those in prison to break out of the way of life or behaviour which got them sent there in the first place. Enabling prisoners to get the skills and the confidence, attitude and aspiration to get a job when they leave prison must be central to our penal system. I think initiatives like The Clink can play a valuable role in that process, as long as it is carefully managed. A statement issued by the Prison Service to accompany the disclosure said: "We want to make prisons more active places. We want to introduce prisoners to the work ethic and make them more employable on release. This is crucial as we know that having a job helps reduce future offending and the misery and cost this causes to communities. Robert Oxley, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "Huge amounts of taxpayers' money is spent keeping offenders behind bars. The profits of the restaurant should be ploughed back into the justice system. This programme appears to be helping prisoners so it's only right it helps those footing the bill for their crimes.