Is eating out a luxury again?

Last week I picked up the bill for an average meal for two with a bottle of wine in a well-regarded but non-Michelin-starred restaurant in the West End. It was just over £400. A few weeks before that, I ordered a pie in a Mayfair restaurant that cost £95. I shared the meal with a slightly bemused German journalist. “It’s good,” he said, “but not £95 good.” In the end, a pie is just a pie. 

I couldn’t do the work I do if I didn’t believe that people with money have a right to spend it however they damn well want, but this was something different. In the year to March, food inflation in the UK ran at 19.2 per cent, against a headline figure of 10.1 per cent. This is anecdotal but, as a reviewer, comparing the bills I’m paying weekly, I’m seeing prices in mid-range restaurants rising much faster than that. As a restaurateur, I’m struggling as hard as I can to make price rises manageable. As a reasonably well-informed industry watcher, I’d say the economics of this are ill-understood. But as a punter? Well, just like you, I’m getting that weird vertigo that marketers refer to as “sticker shock”.

The cost of living crisis affects us all, but some of us more than others. Rich people are comparatively immune, while for the less well-off, it’s grindingly miserable. Something similar can be said of businesses. We know there’s suffering in all sectors but, once again, bigger, more established businesses are better able to weather the storm than smaller ones.

We’re also beginning to see that there’s something uniquely grim about the restaurant sector. Many of us were writing before the pandemic about things becoming unsustainable. We’d got to a stage where you couldn’t open a restaurant in London without big investors to cover colossal rents. Restaurants therefore had to be expensive and prestigious and business plans were based on 100 per cent utilisation; full rooms and waiting lists. Staff pay and conditions were less than adequate. The system was bloated and teetering back then, but now everyone is talking about restaurant prices. And while prices, in themselves, might be shocking, there’s an underlying weakness in our febrile food culture which might, ultimately, be even more destructive.

For years, most restaurants have worked to a single fag-packet equation: 30 per cent ingredients, 30 per cent wages, 30 per cent overheads, 10 per cent profit

Price inflation, to be sure, is…