On 20 June, I wrote:
'[The wealthy restaurateur and club owner Richard] Caring’s first mistake is to believe that Boris Johnson’s Cabinet cares about Britain’s hospitality business and fully realises its importance. I do not believe that there are many members of this Cabinet who either know or care about the difference between a good meal or glass of wine and a bad one.
'One factor that binds Johnson so closely to Trump is their joint dislike, perhaps born of ignorance, of spending time or money on eating well. Both of them, from their looks at least, could do with being put on a good diet. The last examples of leaders who really cared about the hospitality business were Prime Minister Tony Blair and Barack Obama in the USA.'
My belief was badly shaken – in a good way – by the British Treasury’s promulgation of the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which they promoted throughout August. By funding a £10 discount against what was spent on food by anyone and everybody eating out Monday to Wednesday, the Treasury very cleverly got the hospitality industry behind them (and simultaneously made a complete fool out of me).
The scheme was highly successful because it targeted those times when restaurants are at their quietest (Monday to Wednesday) and, although it may have cost the Treasury an awful lot of money (upwards of £500 million), it persuaded many restaurateurs that the Treasury would listen, that they understood the enormous contribution the hospitality industry makes to the UK economy today, and that there was some hope for an industry that had suffered three months of closure. 11/10 for the Chancellor and his Treasury.
This, very sadly, has been followed by a measure of such total disregard for the hospitality industry, that it is virtually impossible to believe that these two measures originated from the same government. But they have done.
The same British government that surprised and delighted us all with the Eat Out to Help Out scheme has decreed that all hospitality venues in England must close their doors at 10 pm on the dot. A measure more stupid to conceive of is hard to imagine.
Pubs and bars may to some extent be the incubators of the wretched virus but why does forcing everybody out at the same time, rather than staggering their departure times as has always been the case, make any sense? Coinciding with the onset of heavy rain, the scene outside Luca restaurant in London’s St John Street last Friday night was one of almost panic: scores of couples huddling under umbrellas busy looking at their iPhones to see when the Ubers that they had ordered – at what must have been fabulously inflated prices – might arrive. The previous week we had seen crowds pressing their way in to underground stations just after 10 pm when they had all been forced to go home at the same time.
Contrast this with the scene inside the restaurant, where we had eaten and drunk exceptionally well. At about 9.40 pm our conversation round the table was interrupted by the sommelier to inform us that they were about to close and did anybody want to order a final drink? Such a question took me back to my early days as a restaurateur in the early 1980s when last orders were a common, legally imposed phenomenon but one I thought we had all very sensibly left behind. This feeling was made worse by walking out past an empty bar where the barman was wiping down the counter. At 10.05 pm!
According to The Caterer trade report, just 4.2% of 782 new acute respiratory incidents reported between 21 and 27 September were linked to food outlets or restaurants – this came in reply to Boris Johnson’s claim on the Andrew Marr Show that the higher number of cases being reported was due to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme.
This blatantly ill-informed decision shows how little this government understands the hospitality industry. Much of its profits are made after 10 pm as customers finish their wine and order a coffee and a final drink. Ten o’clock is the time when many restaurants that are used to serving a multi-course tasting menu are just approaching the cheese and dessert courses. These will now have to be either curtailed or brought forward. Those restaurants with a late licence, say until 2.30 am, are now worth considerably less than they were a month ago. By cutting VAT from 20% to 5% the Chancellor was already planning for a much diminished tax return. Now, having cut off the hospitality industry’s biggest spending times, he will have to face an even smaller return.
Restaurateurs are trying to readjust. Some are rewarding with a discount those who book to eat before 6 pm. Hoteliers are offering special discounts with meals in rooms thrown in. But the future looks decidedly uncomfortable.
A figure I saw this morning in The Caterer made for bleak reading: 64% of British hospitality providers say that unless this curfew is lifted, it will lead to the closure of their business within six months. That is a tragically high figure that hides a huge number of jobs lost, a vast amount of VAT that will never be generated, and, eventually, a profusion of abandoned properties.
My fear is that with this government, which seems incapable of admitting to a mistake, we are fast heading in that direction.
