It was not £35 for a tiny quail that tipped me over edge, but £9 for some bread. Nine pounds! Hands up: the restaurant was in Harrods, a department store that relishes adding zeros to price tags. But rarely have I felt more like one of those dimwitted posh customers in the Harry Enfield sketch in which he runs a shop called I Saw You Coming. My wife wondered if the bread rolls would arrive with hidden silver coins like a Christmas pudding.
And it’s not just in Knightsbridge — eating out has become very, very expensive. Country pubs, the local Italian, hamburger joints and brasseries with no aspirations to get Michelin stars are increasingly charging prices that make diners say: “How much?!”
We all have our breaking point. Mine was £9 for bread, for others it might be £4.50 for a small bowl of olives or £65 for a Dover sole.
Alex Micu is a photographer who reckons he eats out at “no-fuss places” twice a week. A few weeks ago he popped into the Chamberlayne, a pub in north London that has been revamped, axing its simple menu of £13 pizzas and swapping it for something a bit more substantial; he was quite excited by the prospect of a good new gastropub in his neighbourhood. “We ordered some drinks and browsed the menu. Then we saw the £19 burger.”
For him, anything over £12 for a burger is “toppy” and the fact the pub’s bavette steak, also £19, came without chips or vegetables was a deal-breaker.
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Of course, value is subjective — Claridge’s sells a burger for £40 — but even in pubs and local bistros the price of many main courses has edged up from the £20 mark to closer to £30. The hike is particularly painful given that, according to CGA by NIQ, a research company that tracks our habits, 40 per cent of us dine in a pub or restaurant every week.
The restaurateurs, for their part, say that if we are feeling the pain, spare a thought for them. “The margins in restaurants have always been tight, phenomenally tight,” says Simon Wood, 46, winner of MasterChef in 2015 and founder of the WOOD restaurant in Manchester. “The oil in my fryer is more expensive than unleaded at Shell.” He says that 20 litres of vegetable oil is now £60, which is indeed about twice the price of fuel.
His restaurant offers a £110 tasting menu, but upstairs he also has Homage, a wine bar where he serves a board of five cheeses, crackers, bread, chutney accompanied by five different glasses of wine for £25. “That is a bargain,” he says. Not all his diners agree, however. A few weeks ago, a woman asked for butter to go with her cheese. “It’s not on the menu. We explained we’d charge for it. She left happy, but the next day she put a story on Instagram about how outrageous it was.” The post and Wood’s defence soon went viral, with one claiming: “£2.50 for some butter to go with a cheese board is mental.”
His response? “Food is not free, crockery is not free, labour is not free, dishwashers are not free, butter is not free.” He points out that inflation is enough to make a grown man cry. “A box of butter [containing 25 packs] four months ago was £36; it is now £84.”
And that bargain cheeseboard and wine selection? As of June 1, it will be £30.
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It’s not just ingredients that are driving up his prices — it is staff wages, Brexit-related costs for importing wine, rents and, particularly, gas and electricity. Wood says his energy bill last month was £13,400. “I am thinking about every aspect of my menu, every dish and every process . . . if I have a braised piece of beef that has to be in the oven all night, it’s a ‘no’.”
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Stuart Procter is the chief operating officer of the Stafford Collection, which owns various establishments, including the Sicilian-inspired Norma in central London. “We’ve taken monkfish off the menu,” he says. “The price to buy it has just gone off the charts. If we were to make any margin on it, it would have to be on the menu at £50 or £60. That might work in Mayfair, but that’s not what Norma is about.” His main courses range between £24 and £45.
He says Norma is insulated to a certain extent by international travellers still coming to London, which is still good value compared with many other European cities. “If you think we are expensive, you should look at Paris. Wow, that’s expensive.”
Anything involving seafood has rocketed in price. There’s a rice dish with five prawns at Lisboeta in west London priced at £49; salt-baked sea bass at Rick Stein’s in Padstow, Cornwall — to share between two — is £80.
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The Lobster Shack, in North Berwick, along the coast from Edinburgh, attracts a cult audience. It is, as the name suggests, however, a kiosk with some windswept tables sheltered by a perspex roof. In 2011 a whole lobster cost £16.50. This year it is £47.95. Nudging £50 is the moment where any dish, however amazing, starts to become more about the price than the food. Can you really enjoy it when you know the dent it’s going to make in your wallet?
Some restaurants, in order to stay profitable, have become more inventive with their menus, offering not just starters, but also “snacks” or “bites”.
“I don’t think it’s hoodwinking customers at all,” says Kateline Porritt, head of trends at the restaurant consultancy Egg Soldiers. “It’s trying to offer them something else. But maybe that’s where you see the bill creep. They are not a full starter, but you end up ordering them because you get excited and get loads to share.”
If you are suffering from bill shock at the end of your meal, blame the snacks. And the bread.
Porritt says along with a plethora of fancy bread and butter courses, anchovies have become a cult ingredient, partly because of their relatively low cost. “They have loads of flavour, but they are ultimately just tinned fish.”
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She mentions she had a great meal at Noble Rot in Soho last week and was struck by the anchovy dish. “It was £11, I think, for just five anchovies. They were very good,” she laughs. “But I was grateful I wasn’t paying.”
Canny restaurants are increasingly offering no or limited-choice set-price menus to avoid customers being baffled at how they ended up having to remortgage to pay the bill. “There are people in the industry who really want to avoid that bill shock — because they want repeat customers,” Porritt says. “And it’s great for the restaurant because they are buying higher volumes of a smaller number of ingredients and they can streamline their labour.”
The Palmerston in Edinburgh, which specialises in nose-to-tail food, has a full menu in the evening but an £18 two-course or £21 three-course lunchtime deal. You have no choice and the dishes tend to be off-cuts from the evening’s ingredients, but that’s still remarkably good value. “We wanted to have a busy restaurant rather than one that makes me loads of money,” says Lloyd Morse, chef and co-founder. It seems to be working. This Tuesday he served 67 covers for lunch, filling every table at least once over. He says some prices in London are “complete madness, but we’re not London. Our rents are far cheaper.”
There are some in London, even in the elite corner of the Monopoly board, who reckon it is possible to offer value-for-money with a set menu. Bellamy’s, a grand old dame in Mayfair that was frequented by the Queen, has a successful table d’hôte menu — £29.50 for two courses, £35 for three.
Gavin Rankin, the owner, says: “I think some restaurants are charging too much — way too much.”
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He believes many of his rivals have just passed on costs, rather than working out if they can make any savings themselves. He decided to close the restaurant on Saturday rather than pay for another chef and waiter. “I’m afraid my colleagues do tend to [complain] when there’s a crisis and then put up their prices. The root of this, in my view, was when VAT was relaxed during Covid.” As an emergency measure, the government slashed VAT from 20 per cent to 5 per cent for the hospitality industry — to help resuscitate an industry on its knees. “Restaurateurs got very used to lower VAT, but when it was reinstated back to 20 per cent, a lot of them thought: ‘Hang on, that’s our lawful profit.’ It wasn’t.”
The rush to eat out after Covid lockdowns proved that, for many, there is no finer treat than a great meal cooked by someone else. But, as Rankin says, “restaurants need to be very careful because there will come a breaking point when people think about where they will go for dinner.”
Or worse, whether they will go out for dinner at all.
