Many of us will remember, misty-eyed, how things changed around the turn of the century. How Britain ceased to be a nation brutalised by rationing and rissoles and instead blossomed into a utopia of celebrity chefs, endless food TV and a population seemingly willing and able to eat out most nights of the week. We no longer regarded ourselves as poor cousins to European nations with ‘cuisines’ – hell, Michelin stars glittered from every orifice. We had the uncalibrated zealotry of converts.
In the years following the pandemic, UK hospitality came blinking back into the light, adopted a collective fixed grin and the can-do attitude of small businesspeople, and did some amazing things while trying to get back to that prelapsarian state of glory. But although massive government support helped, the lockdowns changed the hospitality scene for ever. It’s taking us all a long time to accept but, depending on how you look at it, the pandemic either screwed things up or burst an overinflated bubble. Either way (or a bit of both), it is becoming apparent that the change is permanent.
If you don’t mind a room full of older people eating classic dishes, you’ll love this new reality
Why am I convinced? Three things.
The first is cost. Rents for hospitality venues have been ratcheting up remorselessly for a long time. That won’t change. Food prices, which rocketed during and after the pandemic, will not come back down in the foreseeable future either. Arguably they were too low in the first place. It seems clear that we haven’t been paying farmers enough for their produce to keep them in business, let alone make their efforts sustainable. And if you know anyone who thinks power and water companies are going to drop their prices, tell me and I’ll sell them London Bridge.
Second, the cost of staff in restaurants won’t come back down. Raising the minimum wage was fair. Hospitality people have long been underpaid for working in often unpleasant conditions. The decision to raise employer’s national insurance probably had to be made, and it will never be undone. The pool of reliable, competent staff has reduced, and the price they can command is naturally rising further and faster.
Finally, diners are unwilling or unable to pay more for their meals. They complain that prices are rising during a cost-of-living crisis. Some are being forced to acknowledge that it is unnecessary to eat every meal ‘out’, or to have everything delivered by a kid on a bike. Their behaviour is changing.
These three inexorable, irreversible trends have created hospitality’s very own triple lock. You’ve probably experienced the effects of the ‘supply side’ of this. You’ll have noticed more dishes on menus made from cheaper ingredients. But the fact that staff costs have increased means that any complexity in preparation or service costs more. Dishes are becoming simpler. Oddly, if the restaurant puts the prices up, while removing quality ingredients, it actually makes economic sense to increase the portion sizes. So you’re paying more… but at least, you notice, it’s a generous serving.
There are a couple of different theories about what’s happening on the ‘demand side’. Many people have pointed out that going to restaurants, at least to non-chain, chef-led independents, has become too expensive for young people. Anecdotally, this seems true. Many of us have noticed that over the past few years, the age and visible wealth of our fellow diners has crept inexorably up. Young chefs and restaurateurs complain that this means a dull old crowd with conservative tastes. They point to the burgeoning number of ‘classic’ French brasserie-style restaurants or nuove trattorie. For all the diversity and innovation of the past few decades, places aping the River Café or Parisian dives are suddenly succeeding again.
Obsessed as I am with the history of commercial hospitality, I see this from a slightly different angle. There are a few restaurant ‘concepts’ – to use the popular and appalling parlance – that favour cheaper ingredients, crowd-pleasing menus, simple service models and accessible prices. They’ve been around for a while and are tested by time and public acclaim. They are classic French brasseries, traditional trattorias, old-school grill rooms or steakhouses, with menus that have evolved to make the best from the least. These are the ‘concepts’ that have been delighting the maximum number of punters, profitably, and remaining unaffected through wars, depressions and… well, apparently through a febrile quarter of a century of celebrity chefs and restaurant innovation.
Margins are shrivelling across the sector, but the difficult news here is that the playing field isn’t level. Large-chain restaurants are better insulated against supply-side issues. They buy ingredients in bulk, cooking is de-skilled, and to encourage demand they can afford to invest in all sorts of promotional deals that appeal to cost-sensitive young people. We shouldn’t delude ourselves: some of them are even pretty good.
When an industry is in trouble, then tough price adjustment and consumer conservatism are natural corollaries. But it’s hard not to conclude that the independent restaurants that used to represent the cool, youthful edge of the industry are becoming more and more reliant on the old and wealthy.
If you had asked your parents what sort of people used to go out to eat, they would probably have told you ‘rich people and old people’. Before the foodie renaissance kicked off in the mid-1990s, they would have been right. We might need to accept that, to some extent, that’s the normality to which we are returning.
If you consider eating out as a special thing that’s worth spending money on and, most importantly, you actually have the money to spend, then this probably won’t trouble you at all. If you don’t mind sitting in a room full of older people eating classic dishes, you’re going to love this new reality. If you accept the notion that having others cook for you and serve you is not a right which should somehow be subsidised, but a privilege that should be paid for, you’re going to get on just fine.
Or perhaps all of us, both the hipsters and the artificial hipsters, should just agree that going to independent restaurants is the reward for a life well lived. Like a cruise, or golf… or a triple-locked pension.
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