If you ate a tasty lunch at a café but when you went to the till were told to pay whatever you liked, how much would you pay? Would you try to get away with only £2?

That is what a café in Deptford did, testing the honesty of the people in the city by serving food for free and asking people to pay how much they felt it was worth.

The Amber Tree Café on Deptford High Street ran the scheme as it was experimenting with a new menu and redesign as they didn’t have a good idea of what people would pay.

Gus Sidhu owns an opticians on the High Street and said he was taken aback when he was told to pay whatever he felt like.

Speaking to News Shopper, he said: “I think it’s a very novel approach and you can see how honest will people be.

“The food that they serve is excellent so you pay what you think it is worth.

“I had the lentil soup with rice and a latte which I paid £5 for. The next day I had scrambled eggs on toast and a latte and paid £8 for it.

“I was caught off guard when told to pay what I want and I had a fiver to hand. I thought I underpaid the previous day so I put more in the next day.”

The small café is undergoing a big revamp with many locals helping out for free to help keep small businesses on the high street open.

Lily Craig-Hallam is one of the people helping the revamp and she revealed that the new pay-what-you-like strategy had to be abandoned by the owner Virginia Verbaitiene within two days.

Lily said: “She wanted to get an idea for what her regular customers would pay.

“The more and more people came, the less and less people would pay. You can get lots of food and then only have to pay two quid.

“She didn’t expect it to get as much attention as it did. It lasted for two days before she realised people would come and eat for very little.”

While the pay-what-you-want experiment was short lived, Virginia is hoping the new tea house style café will be a big boost to her business.

She said: “It was struggling a little but in the future it will be a tea room and with all these nice people’s help we will get it to work.”