The subtitle of the exhibit was The Art of Digital Breathing, seemingly a dichotomy. The conceit is that the work is alive in some provisional, uneasy way. Machines built from silicone and frog cells and live neurons, rather than just steel. One of them released slow rounds of smoke which drift high above our heads and burst into nothingness. The writing on the wall suggests that the exhibit breathes. And it does, although it is not alive.

The principal question is one that has been circled for decades — if not longer — but seems all the more pertinent today. Can a machine have a soul? They reach, over and over, for the same story to question it. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Nightingale, written in 1843, by a Dane watching the industrialisation of the world around him.

The story goes that in his porcelain palace, a Chinese emperor discovers that the most celebrated thing in his empire is a little nightingale which he has never heard sing. The whole world has written books and poems about it, living wild in the woods down by the sea. The emperor has it brought to his court. Then, a gift arrives from the emperor of Japan, a mechanical nightingale, gold and diamond encrusted, which performs a single flawless tune in perfect time. Over time, the court comes to prefer it, because it is predictable and perfect. They could sing along, by heart. The bird never tires, and never surprises. Meanwhile, the real bird slips back to the forest.

Those who had heard the live nightingale could tell the difference. The mechanical one sounded beautiful, undeniably, almost exactly like the real thing, although something nearly imperceptible was missing. One night, the mechanical bird breaks, and the music stops. Years later, the emperor lies on his deathbed, and the living nightingale returns, singing Death out of the room.

I stood in front of all this circuitry and felt discomforted, as a man who tries to make dining rooms run smoothly, that I may have been trying to build the golden bird. Because that is what some restaurants have become. Frictionless. Tuned to perfection, hitting the same notes every service. The same dishes land on the same plate, at the same temperature, every service, and the staff offer up the same greetings and platitudes to each and every table that they serve, until nothing wavers and nothing surprises, nor delights, and eventually, nothing moves you.

But the purest form of the golden bird is not the independent restaurant, it is the chain. A hundred identical rooms run from a corporate handbook, where the uniform is specified down to the button, and the service to the syllable, and the menu hasn’t changed in years, because to do so would be to trust someone to make a decision. That is the golden bird, perfect, reproducible, the same in Leeds as in Lisbon. And that perfection is why it will always be imperfect. It is merely an imitation of a real restaurant.

It does, of course, creep into smaller places too — I have felt it creep into mine — although in an independent restaurant it is usually, at most, a temptation rather than the goal.

Our menus have always been designed to change frequently. Our team, although asked to hit certain steps, are never handed a script, because a script is only one step removed from a handbook and I’d much rather hear a slightly clumsy sentence that someone meant, over a flawless one that they were told to say. Warmth over technical perfection, every time, although both are preferable. That is very easy to write, but hard to sit with, because warmth is inconsistent by its very nature, and inconsistency can be frightening.

And sometimes, I overcorrect. I tighten things that didn’t need it, and I’ve caught myself, more than I’d care to admit, smothering a room until it looked like a mechanical bird. What I fear is that someone (or even I) will walk into one of my restaurants and feel nothing at all. No wobbles, no warmth, only the clean, sterile buzz of a place that runs perfectly and has no soul.

Han Kang, in Greek Lessons, sets down three sentences magnificently. The beautiful is beautiful, the beautiful is noble, the beautiful is difficult. It’s the final one that resonates with me. Beauty is difficult because difficulty is what it’s made from. The song moves you because the bird might falter, because it’s tired, or the night is cold, and it could fail, but instead, this time, it succeeded.

A machine can’t give you that. The golden bird never struggles, and so it never achieves anything. The Octobot, which the show calls the first fully soft robot, moves on a chemical reaction between two liquids and has not the faintest idea that it is moving. Its body, the label says, is insensitive to the world around it. There is nothing at stake, nothing is difficult, and so nothing it does is beautiful, regardless of how flawlessly it does it.

The fear is that the machines are coming for our song, but I’m not worried about that. The machine will learn the notes, better even than we can. But it will never find them difficult, and it will never stand in a cold garden, with a chance of failing, and sing anyway. That is what we get to keep for ourselves, for as long as we are willing to sit with difficulty. The golden bird was perfect and gave the emperor nothing, right up until it broke. I would far prefer that we falter with intention, and that I walk into a room one evening and feel something, even if it feels a little wrong, than the smooth, sterile nothing of a place that has finally been perfected.

One comment has stayed with me, because it held the whole problem in a single sentence. wrote that however many times we explain the numbers, a portion of the public will stay certain they’re being overcharged, because they’ve done the maths on a Tesco shop. There it is. The diner arrives with a yardstick, and the yardstick is the supermarket, or the rate of inflation, or what the same dish cost last year. None of those things can measure most of what has actually moved.

So let me come back to it, a year on, because a great deal has moved — and almost none of it to the magnitude the yardstick would predict.

When I wrote last spring, the worst of it was still arriving. Employer National Insurance had just gone up — the rate to 15%, and the threshold at which an employer starts paying it cut from over £9,000 to £5,000 — and we were all bracing for what that would do across a full year of wages. The bracing is over now. It has arrived, and it sits in every set of accounts in the country. The wage floor, meanwhile, has climbed again: £12.71 an hour from this April, up from £12.21 a year ago, up from £11.44 the year before that. Two steps up a staircase in two years.

Then, on the last day of March 2026, the business rates relief that hospitality had leaned on since the pandemic simply ended. It was replaced by a permanently lower rate, which sounds like help right up until you notice that the same reform revalued every premises in the country against rents that had recovered since Covid. A lower rate applied to a higher value exercises itself, for a great many operators, as a bigger bill, not a smaller one.

And VAT, the one lever that would have changed the arithmetic at a stroke, didn’t move at all. The trade asked — loudly, all year — for a reduced rate on eating out, the kind most of Europe has already adopted. The answer was no. No cut, no change to the threshold, nothing. 20%, exactly where it was, while France sits near 10% and Germany has just legislated its way down to 7%.

Now hold all of that against the diner’s yardstick. Inflation is running at 2.8%. A reasonable person, measuring fairness by that number, expects a restaurant’s prices to rise by roughly the same and feels cheated when they rise by more. But for a typical labour-heavy independent — the kind of place most people picture when they picture a restaurant — the rise needed simply to stand still this year, same dishes, same thin margin, is closer to 8%. More than double what the yardstick calls fair.

About a third of that is ordinary inflation. Food, energy, and the overheads that creep up the way everything creeps up. That third behaves exactly as the diner expects. The other two-thirds came from government, not the market. Roughly half of that policy share is the wage itself, and that half I will defend to anyone, because I can see precisely where it goes. It goes to the people standing in the kitchen, who should not be poor for the privilege of feeding the rest of us. The other half is employer National Insurance and the lost rates relief: costs that reach no worker’s pocket, that nobody campaigned for, that exist only as a transfer from the business to the Treasury. Nearly as large as the wage rise everyone wanted, and invisible to everyone who didn’t.

So when dinner costs more, the diner — yardstick in hand — reaches for one of the only two explanations it allows. Either the restaurant has got greedy, or they themselves have got profligate. Both are wrong. Prices didn’t move because operators wanted more, and they didn’t move because diners wanted too much. They moved because we, collectively, made a decision — pay low-paid people better — and then skipped the second conversation entirely. The one about who carries the cost of the first.

We asked for the wage floor to rise, and we were right to. We just forgot to ask who’d pick up the tab. So it turned up on the bill, and we acted surprised to find it there.

None of this is restaurants alone, though a restaurant is the only place I can speak from honestly. The salon, the café, the garage at the end of the road — any business that is mostly people, in a building, on thin margins, is feeling the same two levers pulled at once. Restaurants just sit at the meanest crossing of them: labour-heavy, low-margin, and unable to reclaim VAT on the two largest costs we carry, wages and food, because one attracts no VAT and the other is zero-rated. We feel the full force of it, which is why the closures show up in our trade before they appear in anyone’s national figures.

The question nobody is really putting to diners is what the trade does next — because that 8% often can’t be charged. Push prices up that far and the tables empty; the yardstick guarantees it. So the gap gets closed in more discreet ways, and the diner is already eating the results without being told.

Menus get shorter. The dish that takes three hours and two chefs — the slow-braised, the hand-rolled, the foraged mushroom that needs cleaning before it’s worth anything — comes off first, because labour is the cost that moved most and labour is what that dish is made of. What replaces it is cheaper to cook, though not always cheaper to buy. Sittings get tighter; the table you once had for the evening becomes the table you have for two hours. Some places drop table service for a counter and an app, which is the rational answer to a labour shock and also an admission that the thing you used to come for — someone who knows the menu, looking after you — has become a cost the model can no longer carry. The groups, with their buying power and head-office leverage, will manage. The independents are the ones who won’t. So the high street keeps hollowing in the middle: chains at one end, a thinning band of expensive rooms at the other, and less and less in between.

And the floor rises again next April. It should. The Low Pay Commission will name a number, the Chancellor will accept it, and the largest cost in the building will climb once more — rightly — onto businesses that have already swallowed two years of this with nowhere left to put it.

Which leaves the price — and here the trade has to be honest with itself, too. Some operators won’t put theirs up all the way, out of fear: that the dish raised by three pounds is the one that sits untouched on a wet Tuesday. It’s a reasonable fear. It is also, percentage by absorbed percentage, how a business contracts itself out of existence. Plenty will raise their prices properly, though, and they should — because holding them below cost isn’t generosity towards the guest. It’s just a slower way of closing the doors.

Long story short: this year, menu prices may be as much as 8% up on last spring — and where they aren’t, it’s the kitchen eating the gap. Next year, who knows. But you may have a damn sight fewer restaurants to choose from.

Most midweek lunches are not lunch. They are a sandwich eaten over a keyboard, a meal deal carried back from the supermarket, a snack at the desk between meetings. As often as not, they are skipped entirely. We have, as a country, decided that lunch is a logistical problem to be solved with as little fanfare as possible. Which is what gives the long midweek lunch its tranquil thrill — the time you take is also the time everyone else has agreed not to.

A dinner out on a Friday, while great, is probably the worst iteration of a restaurant. It’s usually packed, and it is the economic engine of a restaurant’s week. With the best will in the world, a stacked weekend dinner service is bloody hard work, especially when there’s late arrivals, table turns, and selling out of food to manage. From the floor, we have to be economical with our time, and our movements. Time is not a luxury in a busy restaurant, not for the guests, and especially not for the team.

Days of the week aside, lunch trumps dinner, almost always. Not only is it usually quieter, but it feels more leisurely. If the sun is beaming, it feels like basking. If the heavens are open, it feels like shelter.

Perhaps an indicator of my old soul, but when I go out for dinner, I might have a table for 7pm. A drink before, perhaps. A three course meal, but more likely four, and a skinful of good wine, means I rarely call it a night before 10pm, at which point a full belly and heavy eyes descend onto me, giving me an uncomfortable, disturbed night’s sleep. I rarely wake from a hefty post-dinner slumber feeling restored.

Lunch, however, is entirely different. Perhaps you start nearby with a coffee, and into lunch. It is more of a choose-your-own-story affair. To drink or not to drink? A light lunch, or a multi-course feast? And of course, what is there awaiting you at the end of the meal? Back to work? The school run? Or most gratuitous, onwards to somewhere else, stretching out your play time seemingly infinitely.

Wine at lunch is its own thing. A glass at 6pm settles in for the evening; a glass at 1pm climbs up the rest of your day. What lunch actually gives you, beyond the food and the wine and the company, is what comes after it. The afternoon is still there. You walk it off, find a bookshop you’ve been meaning to visit, drink another somewhere else. Lunch is the start of something. Dinner is the end of it.

I remember a magnificent lunch a couple of years ago. A group of chefs and restaurateurs headed to London for an event, and of course, we made suitable allowances for lunch in the diary. It was a reasonably late one, 3pm or so, at Fallow. I was, unfortunately, cadaverous, due to an affliction that resounded with me from my previous night in the pub. Of course, the restorative power of lunch (and a frozen margarita) reinforced my constitution, and I was reanimated. By the time our meal had concluded, and we’d enjoyed a tour of the kitchen by Chef Jack (), it was no longer lunchtime but rather the onset of dinner, the restaurant having emptied and begun to refill. We left, and in the nature of chefs and restaurateurs, we went to the pub before our train home. I was suitably re-inebriated, and we headed back West. Time had expanded. I got home, and climbed into bed, looking at my watch. It was 9pm. What greater joy than to be well fed, very well lubricated, and to enjoy the solace of an early night.

Chef Daniel Clifford of Midsummer House put it best. When you eat a really good lunch, you get to think about it for the rest of the day.

Quarter past nine on a Thursday, the door at Lapin slides open and in walks a man with a bag over his shoulder, a sweat on his brow, a little short of breath. He’d come straight off the train from London. His old university friends were somewhere across Bristol, waiting for the weekend to begin. He’d chosen to start his a little differently. Something civilised before the debauchery, he’d said.

He sat down alone, looked at the menu, and asked for some recommendations. I made the mistake — if you can call it that — of answering a little too thoroughly. I rattled through half the menu. The gougères (always), the soufflé suissesse, a wine that had just arrived and was making me very happy indeed. He listened, nodded, and proceeded to order most of what I’d described, with a few of his own choices scattered in. A trou normand appeared as a brief sojourn before pudding — Calvados over sorbet, the universal signal that you have no intention of stopping — and I thought: yes. This one.

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The world of restaurants suffers from Magpie Syndrome, in which the hot new opening apparently becomes the only restaurant in your world, and therefore the only obvious choice. I’m not immune, but these visits rarely reflect where a restaurant will be in six months to a year’s time. They’re either balls to the wall, firing on all cylinders, or still finding their feet. So despite the planetary gravitational pull of Impala, the newest addition to the Super 8 empire, I thought it prudent to rectify my former failures by flouncing through Soho to Kiln, in the hope that I could secure a table and exercise such restraint as not to ruin my dinner (a rarity). I did indeed secure a single seat for lunch, and exercised the most remarkable caution in ordering — rather quickly derailed when I heard from the door: is that Dan? Dan!

I looked over to see Sabrina Ghayour of bountiful cookbook fame heading over, at which point she joined me and, in her fashion, proceeded to over-order and heap mounds of clay pot noodles onto my plate. Damn my rubber arm. As I finished, I once again heard Dan! called from the door. I hasten to add this is not normal, but a serendipitous occurrence. And there stood Rino, a talented chef I know from his time working in Bristol, turning up for his shift. Funny old world.

Coming off the tail end of a particularly intense working week, I noted I had precisely three hours between lunch and my dinner reservation. So, soaking in the sun, I strolled around Soho and ended up plonking myself in Hanover Square to read my book and work on my tan (Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín, if you’re interested).

The main reason for the jaunt was to meet my fellow Substacker , who had very kindly invited me to the launch of their absolutely gorgeous cookbook, The Rise of Indian Cooking, which he co-authored. But before we get to that, there’s the matter of dinner. Liam had also generously invited me onto his table for the launch of Tresind Mayfair — the team behind the cookbook, and a clutch of restaurants in Mumbai and Dubai.

I always find restaurants like this fascinating to witness as a restaurateur. They’re so far removed from the kind of restaurant I run, with a near-impossible level of precision in the food and the service. They truly do leave no stone unturned. But perhaps imperceptible to most guests who walk into a room like this, the nerves are palpable — first full service. Loaded to the gills with staff, as charming as they were, I always recognise the heartbeat under the gloss, and it perpetually ignites a flame within me. God I love that feeling. What was it I was saying about not wanting another restaurant just yet? It is a magnetic pull, and I feel it tugging at me, urging me to hop back to Bristol, to nurture an underdeveloped business plan into something more concrete. I do wonder if that feeling will ever subside.

The food, as expected, was really excellent — such a treat to enjoy Indian cooking at those heights. Despite Liam having only landed from Dubai that afternoon, we couldn’t quite let the evening end, so we ended up in Ducksoup for a glass of wine before calling it a night.

The launch of the book was on Sunday afternoon at Fortnum & Mason, so surely that meant I could squeeze in a breakfast — and where better to self-diagnose with Magpie Syndrome than in the utterly beautiful Grand Divan at Simpson’s in the Strand. They really don’t make restaurants like this anymore, except for one person of course, the inimitable Jeremy King, who seems to have unlocked time travel, transporting his guests into a bygone era. In a time of pace, and rigidity, and turn times, and ‘I must simply get to my next meeting’, he has masterfully crafted a dining room that invites you to while away the hours.

The waiter who brought the toast didn’t seem to be timing anything. He was just there, then he wasn’t, then he was again with more coffee. The room didn’t move me along; it held me. The resurgence of the long lunch (or breakfast in this case) is a beautiful thing, made all the more enjoyable by the room and the service.

We live in a world of chef-driven restaurants, and as someone who owns and runs restaurants from the floor, the opportunity to indulge in a restaurant built around the dining room rather than the kitchen comes less often than I’d like. If I may add, what a bloody pleasure it is to see restaurants serving decent coffee these days. God, I detested the swill so ubiquitous only a few years ago.

A brief sojourn to the National Gallery and several coffees later, I arrived at Fortnum & Mason for the book launch and met a few folks I know from Substack, plus some new ones from the world of food and drink. Chef Himanshu Saini was a treat to listen to. He builds his menu not by meat or fish, but by region of India — a beautiful way to travel the menu.

Monday had me reconvene at Hide for breakfast. Bit of a bonkers place really. One Michelin star serving breakfast at a remarkable standard — fresh viennoiserie, a strawberry and sorrel croissant, the most beautiful mango I’ve ever seen, smoked salmon pancake (yes, three-course breakfast, sue me), all enjoyed at industry rates via the CODE app. Hospo people, if you’re not familiar, get yourselves on it. Special rates at participating restaurants if you’re in the trade.

I dodged, ducked, dipped, dived, and dodged the intermittent showers and imbibed more coffee than is considered healthy, before making my way to Somerset House for a CODE event with Victor Lugger of Big Mamma Group and sunday. This was interesting. The talk was about sunday, his software company that enables QR payments and ordering. What I found most gripping was that he wasn’t simply trying to flog faceless ordering to fast food chains, but actually making a case for QR payments in restaurants of all levels. The framing was hard to argue against. Give people the option to pay in person with the staff, or scan and pay at their own pace. To the hospitality-driven restaurateur, this seems like an egregious failure of warmth, but in truth, forcing someone to wait for a bill and a card machine is arguably worse service. I’m not quite ready to trial it in my restaurants just yet, but it’s certainly an interesting way to look at service, and giving the guest the flexibility to dine on their own terms while still working for the restaurant.

Come 7pm, I was truly exhausted, and I made my way back to Paddington. Usually, I work on the train, or if I’m bunking, I read. On this occasion I gratuitously thumbed at my phone and spent the entire journey watching Instagram reels. I got back to Bath feeling tired, but very happy indeed.

And despite the feeling I had at Tresind, I’m still not quite ready to open restaurant number three.

BANK was, with utmost generosity, a tough old ride for the first three years. Lapin, by contrast, is what some people might call a relatively successful restaurant straight out the gate. What I can say for certain is that it’s been a damn sight easier. The temptation is to attribute this success to my own brilliance. I learned so much. I know what I’m doing now. I could never fail, I’m untouchable. I see it frequently. People have a hit site, think it was all them, replicate it, and absolutely flop. They think they’ve got the Midas touch, but all that glitters is not gold. The truth — and I don’t have all the answers — is that restaurateuring is at least 50% luck. Probably more.

A couple of months ago, I was sitting down with another Bristol restaurant who were having a hard time financially and needed an injection. We were going to invest and become co-owners. It was exciting and scary, much like opening a restaurant of my own. Until, one Friday night, I had what you might generously call a mild breakdown. I was overworked, and the thought of helping turn around a restaurant — someone else’s restaurant — was just a bit too much to stomach. And more importantly: what if I failed? My fear of failure has stopped me doing things, and my fear of being perceived as a failure has made me do too much. That’s a fun tightrope to walk.

What I see in restaurant groups — discontent with one or two outstanding places — is that they take a loan, they open another, and it’s hard. One of three things follows. They fly high — some people are just superhuman, I’m looking at you Public House Group, how exactly do you do it? — or they decline, going from two beautiful restaurants to three ok ones. Or they crumble entirely, when a strong gust of wind knocks down their not-so-carefully assembled house of cards. They, like Icarus, flew too close to the open fire of the farm-to-table kitchen, and burned their organic corn-fed wings.

Growth is hard. To do it well is harder. You get pulled in every direction. You can’t double the workload — there are literally not enough hours — so you halve your attention, or quarter it, or worse. You rise or fall to the people and systems around you. Stretch marks are what growth leaves behind. Sometimes they’re beautiful. Sometimes they’re a tear that doesn’t close.

So where do I sit in this? I do, ultimately, want more. The plan, as it stands, is four — no more than five. That way I can spend at least one day a week in each, still walk the floor, still know the guests. Opportunities come organically, and the temptation can be very strong. The hardest thing is having the resolve to say no, and making sure the two I have stand tall on their own first. Quite frankly, I’m having a lot of fun with what I’ve got. Two good rooms. Two brilliant teams. Writing I’m enjoying more than I expected to. I love building new things. I’m just not sure I’m ready for another breakdown just yet.

Nobody tells you about the bags.

They tell you about the margins, eventually. They tell you about the staffing, the suppliers, the EHO inspection that lands on the worst possible Tuesday. But the bags — the small, stupid, completely avoidable gaps in your planning — those you discover yourself, in real time, with a guest waiting and your heart somewhere near your throat.

I opened Bank in the summer of 2021. A corner site on the Wells Road, Totterdown — traffic-logged, sun-baked, and finally ours. I’d had a knee reconstruction that January, so the final push was done at a modified pace — a determined hobble toward something that felt like a finish line, until the doors actually opened and it became obvious it was really the starting blocks. Opening a restaurant is the ultimate conflict of emotions. You’re excited — genuinely, almost stupidly excited — to see something you’ve built from nothing start breathing on its own. And then the doors open and the excitement cracks slightly, because now it’s real, and real things can go wrong.

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What I’m less sure about, however, is what the set menu seems to be turning into. I look at what’s out there, and I genuinely cannot fathom how they make the numbers work. Great restaurants, with outstanding chefs, are offering set menus that make me look like I’m price gouging at under thirty quid. Some of those restaurants are in London, and some are in the sort of postcode that requires a mortgage just to walk around.

I get it. I’m not writing this from some comfortable position of having all the answers. The mid-week trade has been gutted, and lunch trade is a shadow of its former self. There are restaurants spending Monday to Thursday marking time, waiting for the weekend to arrive and keeping its fingers crossed that it covers what the weekdays couldn’t. In that world, an inexpensive set menu makes sense. It puts bums on seats, and generates something where otherwise there’d be nothing. These are simply people doing what we all do when the going gets tough — looking for a way to keep going.

Some people do it really well. Batch cooking, inexpensive ingredients, limited availability, real discipline. They have understood exactly what their kitchen can do at a given price point and built accordingly.

Our first prix fixe at Lapin was an instant hit. Three courses for £29. Ham hock terrine, steak frites, St. Emilion au chocolat. People loved it, and every week Jack would come to me, like some Victorian peasant boy, cap in hand. “Please sir, we can’t afford to keep doing it. Please let me put something more cost effective on.” I insisted we keep going, watching as costs rose and margins shrank, until we simply couldn’t stomach it any further.

Although the vast majority of people loved it, we heard an endless stream of requests and complaints.

I don’t like chocolate, can I swap the dessert? I don’t eat pork, can I change the starter? Can I just do two courses? The steak is a bit small, I expected it to be bigger. Can I get more chips? What do you mean it doesn’t include a salad?

The simplest solution for all of those guests, of course, was the à la carte menu, where they could order precisely what they wanted. The reason they didn’t: that’s more expensive, I only want to spend the £29. Which is fine, but it does rather limit the grounds for complaint.

And then, the review that has stuck in my mind the longest.

Yes. No shit. If you order more food and drink, the bill will, in fact, get a bit bigger. What next — I ordered two bottles of wine and they cost twice as much as one? Mon dieu.

The most nagging scenario is the one in which an operator responds to all of that by saying yes. Swap this, skip that. That’s not a set menu, that’s charity dressed up as hospitality. The operators who are making the format work really understand it. Countertalk just published a magnificent piece (they’re always one step ahead of me) pulling together some of the best examples — Quality Wines, Bubala, Manteca among them — and the message from Marc Summers at Bubala was unambiguous: half-in, half-out set menus with excessive swaps deliver the worst of both worlds. Operational chaos for the kitchen, confusion for the guest. The restaurants doing it well have committed fully to the format. That commitment is precisely what makes it work.

And the problem with not committing is what it tells the guest. Has anyone ever actually paid full price for a Domino’s pizza? I mean the real price, the one that’s technically on the website before the two-for-Tuesday code or the app deal or whatever they’re running this week? Because once you’ve eaten that pizza for nine pounds, it’s a nine pound pizza. The number printed on the menu is no longer the price. It’s just where the negotiation starts. And I think some restaurants are sleepwalking into exactly that. You tell a guest that your food is worth fifteen pounds — implicitly, that’s what you’re saying — and then next season you try to charge them what it actually costs, and you’re not repricing a menu. You’re contradicting yourself. Guests don’t forget that.

At the risk of sounding like your accountant, a busy restaurant and a successful restaurant are not the same thing. A full dining room is a wonderful feeling. I’ve never been immune to it. But full tables that don’t cover costs aren’t a business. It’s a very long, very tiring delay, at the end of which you’ll still have the same problem, except now your team is exhausted and your guests think your prices are negotiable.

I worry that this will end badly for a lot of operators, and we won’t know who that is until it becomes public. Some will find a way to make the numbers work properly and come through fine. Some will close, and people will be baffled — it was always so busy, how did that happen? And then prices will drift back up to where they need to be, and guests will decide restaurants got expensive again, and here we go again.

What I’d hate to lose in all of that is what a set menu is actually for. Not a panic measure. Not a way of undercutting whoever opened nearby. Just a kitchen that knows what it wants to cook, has worked out what that costs, and is offering it to you straight. That version of it is genuinely worth something. I’m just not sure the current race is pointed in that direction.

He called out an order for snacks and champagne without hesitating. We weren’t expecting it. We stood in the kitchen, Jan plating in front of us and handing them over himself, then going straight back to his tickets. Three things. A glass each. Twenty minutes of conversation while he plated and called the kitchen. Then we thanked him, left, and went for dinner somewhere else.

I need to go to Wilson’s properly. Not because they’re consistently noted in the all-important lists, but because three things eaten standing up in a kitchen left me more lit up about returning than some meals I’ve sat down to properly. The less I had, the more it opened.

There are two kinds of full, and they’re not the same. There’s the physical kind — done, properly done, couldn’t eat another thing. That’s the baseline; if a kitchen isn’t clearing that bar, something has gone wrong. But there’s the other kind too. The dish you didn’t order. The train home where you’re already arguing with yourself about what you’d choose differently next time. Not because anything was missing — because you’ve just been reminded that there’s more.

In January, Jack and I ate at ’s Trinity; last autumn, at 64 Goodge Street. Both one Michelin star. Both running an à la carte — Trinity’s in a 4-4-4-4 structure, four snacks, starters, mains and desserts at £125; 64 Goodge Street running three courses at lunch for £59, which is, quite simply, too cheap for what it is. Outrageously good cooking at prices that feel like an oversight.

At both restaurants, Jack and I ordered differently and shared. At both, we finished the meal having eaten perhaps half the menu between us. The other half sat there, unordered, unknown. At Trinity I’d been torn between the agnolotti and the smoked salmon. The waiter noticed, suggested the salmon — a classic, apparently, worth having on a first visit — and I took his advice. Then, quietly, while Jack and I were into the starters, he came back and set the agnolotti down between us. “I couldn’t have you miss out, seeing as I recommended the salmon.” So simple. So elegant. So powerful.

On the train home I was already planning the return visit. Not because anything had been missing — the meal was complete, the cooking was dizzying — but because I knew exactly what I wanted next time. The menu had given me enough to want the rest of it. FOMO, really. The good kind. The kind that brings people back.

I wrote something a while ago about the joy of anticipation — the pleasure of waiting for a meal you’ve already booked. This is the same instinct, activated from the other end. The restaurant puts you on the hook not before you arrive, but after you leave.

I should say, tasting menus can be extraordinary. I’ve eaten some of the best food of my life sitting through them. This isn’t a polemic.

But they do tend to close. You’ve eaten everything, seen the whole thing, and until the menu changes you’ve finished it. That’s a valid experience, although different altogether.

I think about this from our side of the pass at BANK and Lapin, more than people might expect. The dish you put on the menu sits next to the dish you don’t. The thing a guest orders shapes what they leave wondering about. Not every table needs to leave hungry in the literal sense — they absolutely shouldn’t — but the best outcome is a guest who’s eaten well and can’t stop thinking about what they didn’t order.

Jan wasn’t thinking about any of this when he called out that order. He was just being generous. There’s no other word for it. Three snacks in a kitchen while he called his tickets and we talked.

I simply need to go back.

Notes on a Napkin

The Joy of Waiting for Dinner

Recently I was reminded that if you build a bit of anticipation, you get to enjoy something twice…

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6 months ago · 22 likes · 8 comments · Dan O'Regan

If you've got an idea for something you'd like me to write about, drop me a message. I read everything.

Email Me Your Ideas

My wife buys strawberries in winter. This drives me a little insane. Not because she’s wrong to want them — I like strawberries, everyone likes strawberries — but because a supermarket strawberry in November is a completely different fruit to the real thing. Pale, flavourless, a poor imitation wearing the right name. And the problem isn’t the strawberry. The problem is that if you’ve only ever eaten that version, you don’t know there’s another one. The ceiling comes down so slowly you don’t notice it dropping.

Supermarkets did that. Not maliciously — they gave people what they wanted, which was everything, always, regardless of season. But the cost was that we stopped understanding what food actually is. When it grows. Where it comes from. What it tastes like when it’s right. People now think, I want to make a particular dish, I’ll find a recipe, go to the supermarket, get the ingredients. Which is fine. But it’s backwards. The better version — the version I’d love to see more of — is you go to a market, you walk around, and you think, those tomatoes look incredible, I’m going to make something with them. Ingredient first. Dish second. That reversal is the beginning of a completely different relationship with food.

We have a complicated relationship with work in the UK — although I appreciate this is the pot calling the kettle black. Grind culture, hustle, the next big thing. How many people these days can confidently cook a meal without a recipe? How many people can open a fridge and make something simple and delicious from what’s there? The rate of play, the volume of work — it’s exonerated us from needing to be any good at feeding ourselves. So we order in, or we get a ready meal. Convenience filled the gap that energy used to occupy.

Of course, there are people working two or three jobs in this country who don’t have the time or the money to think about seasonal tomatoes. They need something hot and affordable and not eaten standing up. And this is where Britain has really let people down — not at the dizzying heights of fine dining, but in the middle, at the point where a functioning food culture would feed its working people something decent in the middle of a working day.

There was a worker’s lunch once. A plate made by someone who knew what they were doing, eaten at a table, at a price that didn’t require you to think twice. It’s almost gone. What replaced it is the meal deal. The desk sandwich. Eleven minutes between meetings, eating something that approximates food.

What a miserable life.

What I actually want is something much simpler than a food revolution. A great sandwich and a demi beer at lunch. A plate of stew in winter with a small glass of house red. At a table. Unhurried. At a price that doesn’t make you wince. The everyday luxury. The meal that doesn’t need to be an occasion to be worth having.

British restaurants can rarely offer that at an accessible price. The VAT, the rents, the wage floor, the rates — the heart of the place cost too much. So everything shifts upmarket to justify the overhead, the middle drops out, and lunch becomes either a treat or a sweaty sandwich. There’s no in between. And so people eat poorly, and quickly, cramming something crap at their desks, and the lunch hour becomes a punchline.

Take the lunch hour back. Eat the hot plate of food. Don’t break the bank. That’s the dream.

Simon asked if there’s a country I admire. A few, actually. But let me give you a specific night instead.

A couple of years ago I was in Greece, a small non-tourist town called Komotini, for a friend’s wedding. I went out to meet a few friends at 11pm and the cafés were full. Young people, older people, families. Drinking espresso, small beers, the odd aperitif. Nobody was egregiously drunk. Twenty-year-olds drinking coffee late into the evening, just having a nice time. Calm. Almost meditative. I stood there for a moment thinking, we don’t have this.

The British alternative to the pub is largely nothing. You go to the pub, or you go home. The idea of a café as a place to spend an evening — sober, sociable, in no particular hurry — doesn’t really exist here in the same way. We never built it. Or we built Wetherspoons instead, which is a different thing entirely.

Spain, Portugal, France, Greece — what they share isn’t cheaper food. Relative to local wages, eating out in Lisbon or Valencia actually costs a comparable slice of income to Bristol or London. What they have is a different set of priorities. The three-generation Sunday lunch isn’t affordable because restaurants are cheap. It’s normal because the culture decided it was worth doing. We didn’t make that decision. Or we made a different one, without realising the consequences.

Part of why those restaurants can hold that place in a community is that the people working in them are considered to be doing something worth doing. The profession has weight. When the job has status, the food gets status, and the room becomes somewhere people want to be, not just somewhere they go when there's something to celebrate. That’s a longer argument for another piece. But it’s not unrelated to any of this.

So. The dream.

A country that knows what a strawberry tastes like in July and has the patience to wait for it. A worker’s lunch that exists and is worth eating. A neighbourhood restaurant that knows your order. A café open at eleven at night where nobody needs to be drunk to justify being there.

Email Me Your Ideas

I heard a story recently, that if a guest goes to a restaurant, orders just right, and drops their napkin a couple of times, then the restaurant makes the princely sum of sweet fuck-all from your visit. Might even cost them.

Let’s build two meals. Real numbers, real margins. Starting at the cheaper end.

A prix fixe lunch. £29 each.

One glass of house wine: £6 each.

Discretionary service at 12.5%: £8.75.

Total bill: £78.75 for two.

First thing to understand about that service charge — it’s not the restaurant’s money. Not one penny of it. Since October 2024, the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act makes it illegal for an operator to keep any of it. It goes to the people who looked after you. All of it. Which is right. But it means the number the restaurant is actually working with is £70.

Oh, but wait a moment, I hear you cry. If you read my recent article on VAT, you’ll know that Rachel Reeves has also taken her share.

So we take off VAT. One sixth of every pound you spend on food and drink in a licensed premises goes to HMRC before the restaurant has paid for a single thing. Net revenue: £58.33.

The average net profit margin for a UK restaurant is 4.2%. On £58.33, that’s £2.45 for the table.

Now. A linen napkin costs around 35p per guest. One napkin per person is in the budget. If both of you drop yours, and we bring you fresh ones, the profit on your table is around £1.75.

That’s the cheap end. Now imagine that evening, different table, different budget.

Two people spending seriously.

Scallops at £15 each.

Ribeye at £40, fries at £6.

A bottle of good champagne at £80 — half each, which feels like a celebration and costs like one.

Food and drink: £202.

Service at 12.5%: £25.25.

Total bill: £227.25.

Of that £227.25, £25.25 is service — straight to the team, as above. The restaurant is working with £202.

Strip out VAT: £168.33 net. Now, here’s where the model tweaks. These expensive ingredients, they cost an awful lot to put on your plate. So much so, that at a straight 70%, the margins are perfect and the tumbleweeds are free. So we say, that’s ok, we’ll compromise. Because 55% of a lot of money is a lot better than 70% of a little bit of money.

So, at a 55% gross margin blended across food and wine, that’s £92.58 of gross margin for the table. Then wages, rent, rates, energy, the card machine, the insurance, the forty other things that eat into a hospitality P&L before anyone sees a penny of profit.

Net profit for the table: £7.07.

You might reasonably think a higher-spending table means a higher cash margin even if the percentage dips a little — and you’d be right, in theory. In practice, a more expensive menu usually means a more expensive kitchen to run it. The cash expands. The compromised GP takes most of it back.

Then one of them — having imbibed one too many martinis before dinner — catches the stem of their champagne glass. It goes over. A quality Riedel glass runs about £7.80 at wholesale.

Net position on that table: a loss of £0.73.

The restaurant lost money. On a table that spent over two hundred pounds on food and drink, tipped properly on top of that, and had what sounds like a bloody good afternoon.

Right. So. The menu.

Scallops. Just as we understand that Dove’s £18 burger is a fundamentally different proposition to a McDonald’s cheeseburger at £1.19, scallops occupy a broad spectrum. A dredged medium scallop and a hand-dived king scallop are not really the same ingredient. The good ones — dayboat, native, in shell — can cost up to £6 each at trade. Before there’s anything else on the plate.

At a 70% target margin, one £4.50 Orkney, hand-dived, XL scallop needs to go on the sold at £15 just to carry its own weight. Add garnish — garlic butter, breadcrumbs, a bit of agretti (as we served at Lapin, and bloody delicious I might add) — another £1.20. Add VAT. The price you actually need to charge is £22.80. For one scallop and something green alongside it.

£22.80. The price at which a lot of people put the menu down.

So it goes on at £14. The margin compresses to around 51%. The kitchen absorbs the gap because it’s the right dish and nobody wants to pull it. Not because the numbers make sense.

I had someone tell me recently that for £14, we should be serving two scallops. I understand where it comes from. I do. But my dear friend — the one scallop at £14 is already the compromise. Two scallops at £14 is a fast route to not serving scallops at all, because my restaurant has closed down and I’m living under a bridge in the darkest depths of Somerset.

The ribeye follows the same logic at higher stakes. A 300g portion of proper dry-aged beef — named farm, aged correctly — costs £13 to £15 at trade. At 70% margin plus VAT: £56. Which is exactly where it sits on a London menu doing it properly, and the price that makes people go quiet for a second before ordering it anyway, or not.

So. The £227.25 dinner for two, bill and service combined. The £25.25 goes to the team, and £33.76 goes to His Majesty(‘s Revenue & Customs). The food and drink revenue — £168.33 — runs through every cost the operation carries, and what comes out the other side is around £7.

Seven pounds. From a table that ate well, drank well, tipped properly, and went home happy.

No one’s the villain in any of this. The guests spent real money. The operator didn’t pocket the difference. It went through wages, suppliers, HMRC, the landlord, and what was left could buy a (shit) sandwich.

The £23 scallop isn’t greed. It’s a restaurant doing the maths honestly and hoping the room agrees.

And if it doesn’t — if the price is too much, if the menu goes back down on the table — that’s fine. That’s a fair decision to make. Just know that the alternative isn’t a cheaper scallop. It’s no scallop. And eventually, if enough people make that call, no restaurant.

So if you go out for dinner, order the scallop, and the steak, and please, for the love of god, don’t knock over any glasses.

I think about that moment sometimes — not because it was shocking, but because it wasn’t.

The same heat that hardens the egg, softens the potato. A restaurant is a pressurised place. Long hours, physical work, the intensity of a room full of people who need things from you simultaneously, every night, without exception. That pressure does different things to different people. Some it hardens. Some it softens. Some it breaks quietly, over time, in ways that aren’t obvious until they are.

The industry doesn’t create addiction. What it does is build an environment in which the conditions for it are so thoroughly normalised that they stop registering as conditions at all.

Today, this is less true than it once was. The past few years have shifted something — more conversation, more willingness to say the word out loud, more places that have genuinely found a better balance in the hours and the culture. Despite that, it is also still absolutely rife.

You start at nine. You work until four. You have an hour. You come back at five and you work until midnight, or one, or whenever the last table decides they’re done. Your social life exists in the narrow window between service and sleep, in bars that are open when normal bars are closed, among people who understand why you’re there at that hour because they’re there too. The substances available in those hours, in those places, among those people, are not incidental. They are structural. They arrived before you did. They will be there after you’re gone.

And it isn’t just the KPs and the junior chefs. It runs the full length of the kitchen, into the dining room, into ownership. I have heard — more than once, from more than one source — of owners offering staff cocaine on shift. Not reluctantly, not in crisis. Casually. The complicity doesn’t sit at the bottom of the industry. It’s distributed evenly, all the way to the top.

I should say, there are people in this industry who use habitually and function magnificently. They win Michelin stars, they own multiple restaurants, they’ve done some of their best work in this state, for years, without visible cost. I’ve known them. You probably have too. The egg, hardened.

About three years ago, when BANK was — there’s no more precise word for it — on the brink, I was working over a hundred hours a week. I should have gone home at the end of each day and slept. Instead I increasingly found myself going out after service, drinking until late, staying at a friend’s, going straight back to work the next morning still wearing yesterday. Sometimes two days in a row. Sometimes three.

I wasn’t using anything I shouldn’t have been. But I understood, in that period, the gravitational pull of it. The way the pressure creates a need for release that sleep alone doesn’t satisfy — because sleep means stopping, and stopping means the thoughts arrive, and the thoughts were not ones I wanted to sit with. Going out was easier. Going out was still moving.

One week, I went into work on a Wednesday and didn’t go home until Sunday. Each day, eight in the morning until midnight. Then out until four or five. A couple of hours on a friend’s sofa, and back to the dining room. On the Sunday, a guest looked at me as I took his order and asked if I’d been out. “I had a couple of beers last night,” I said. He looked back quietly and said, “Your eyes betray you.” I went to the bathroom. They were red, bloodshot. I was not myself. I went back to the floor and carried on. That night I was in bed by seven.

For me, this was a blip. For others, this is their life.

I’ve watched people I respected disappear into this. Not dramatically — that’s the movie version. What actually happens is slower. Someone who was never late starts being late, and eventually you’re having a conversation you didn’t want to have, and they’re telling you they’re fine, and you can see they’re not fine, and neither of you says the actual word.

The industry loses people this way. Not just to other careers — to recovery programmes that take them out of hospitality entirely, because the environment is too close to the thing they’re trying to leave. To quiet exits. To someone who stops answering, moves away, just isn’t there anymore. Occasionally to worse things. Those losses land differently and sit with you longer.

There’s a grief in this industry that doesn’t get talked about much. Not the grief of a bad review or a closed restaurant — those have a shape, a beginning and an end. The other kind. Where you look around a room that used to have someone in it and the room carries on without them, service beginning, and you carry the absence somewhere it doesn’t interrupt the work.

People spend more than a third of their lives at work. In our industry, more. They rely on us — on me — not just for a wage but for something to build a life around. That's not nothing. And it means the people with the most power in this industry are also the ones most capable of enabling someone's worst years. I think about that when the room carries on and someone isn't in it anymore.

If this topic interests you, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments—and if you are more economically inclined than I am, your perspective would be genuinely welcome. I am making the argument as an operator, not an economist, and I am happy to be challenged.

What it looks like from inside

Menu pricing is a mysterious art to most people. Even among those who eat out regularly and are well-informed, the outside view is really quite different from the reality.

You begin with food cost. You have a dish in mind, you know what it costs to produce, and you know you need that cost to sit at around 32% of what you charge for it if the numbers are going to work. The dish costs £8 to produce. You need to charge £25 for it to carry its share of the overheads.

Then you add VAT. That £25 becomes £30 on the menu. The number the guest sees has never been the number the business works from — and the difference is not margin. It belongs to HMRC before the plate leaves the pass.

Then you think about the room. The street. The guests who come through the door on a Tuesday in February. You think about the dish above it and below it on the menu, and whether £30 reads as reasonable in that context or whether it reads as the kind of price that makes people put the menu down. You think about what happened the last time you put prices up — whether trade was steady, or whether tables sat empty on nights when they hadn’t before.

And somewhere in all of that, embedded in every number you write down, is VAT. Not as a line item you’re actively considering. As a structural constraint you’re working within. One-sixth of whatever you charge was never yours. You are not pricing a £30 dish. You are pricing a £25 dish and collecting £5 on the government’s behalf.

The difficulty is that the guest reads the £30 and makes judgements about value and fairness and what kind of restaurant this is. They do not read £25 plus £5 collected for HMRC. That number doesn’t exist in their experience.

I’ve sat with a menu in front of me — my own menu, for BANK — and thought: this dish should be £24 net. Add VAT, and it needs to sit at £28.80 on the menu. But £28.80 in this room reads as too much. Not by much. But enough. So it goes on at £26, the kitchen absorbs more of the cost, and the margin on that dish is thin enough that a bad month removes it from the menu entirely.

There’s a version of this where I ask for sympathy. This isn’t that version. This is the version where I ask for the maths to be done honestly — all of it, including the parts the Treasury has not yet calculated.

What’s actually happened

VAT returned to 20% in April 2022. What followed is not a story of a sector absorbing a difficult trading environment and adjusting. It’s a story of persistent, accelerating structural failure.

Since the rate was restored, approximately 13,250 accommodation and food service businesses have entered formal insolvency.1 Four consecutive years running well above the pre-pandemic baseline. The sector accounts for around 14% of all UK corporate insolvencies while representing approximately 3.5% of registered businesses by count.2 No other sector comes close to that disproportion.

The independent restaurant count — the businesses that are not chains, not franchises, not backed by private equity — is down 17% since 2020. These aren’t premises that were replaced. They’re gaps on streets that have stayed gaps.

Behind the business count is a jobs count. In the ten months following the October 2024 Budget, 89,000 hospitality jobs were lost.3 Sector employment fell approximately 5% in a single year, with no compensating recovery visible in the vacancy data. The April 2025 National Insurance increase added further pressure whose full-year effect is not yet in any dataset. The trajectory was already downward before it landed.

This is the context in which the fiscal argument about VAT sits. The sector’s difficulties are not mono-causal — post-pandemic debt, energy costs, wage inflation, and the April 2025 NI increase have all compounded the pressure. But VAT is the structural constant underneath all of it: the rate that was set before any of those costs landed, that takes its share regardless of whether the business is profitable, and that has been higher here than in almost every comparable economy throughout. The other pressures are cyclical or at least addressable. The VAT rate is a policy choice.

What insolvency actually costs the Treasury

Here’s the number the government doesn’t include in its response to calls for a reduced rate.

When a hospitality business becomes insolvent, HMRC recovers an average of five pence for every pound it is owed.

This is not an industry estimate. It comes from HMRC’s own Annual Report and Accounts.4 The Insolvency Service’s research confirms the picture: the overwhelming majority of liquidations produce nothing for any creditor, including HMRC, even where it holds preferential status.5 The debt at risk runs to billions. Most of it will not be recovered.

Now consider what this means in practice.

In January 2023, Selin Kiazim and Laura Christie closed Oklava, their Turkish Cypriot restaurant in Shoreditch. They had opened it in 2015. Over eight years it earned a serious reputation — praised in Harden’s guide as “fabulous,” beloved by its neighbourhood, the kind of independent that a street builds its identity around. When it closed, Kiazim wrote: “The scale of the challenge was too great for us in the end, the mountain too high.” The insolvency firm Begbies Traynor was already engaged.

Oklava was not a failure in any meaningful sense. It was a well-run, well-regarded restaurant that ran out of margin. It was the 2,703rd restaurant to become insolvent in 2022-23.

And from the Treasury’s perspective, each closure is a revenue stream that simply stops — not just the VAT debt outstanding at the point of closure, but everything that follows. A typical small hospitality business generates around £180,000 a year in combined VAT, employment taxes, and business rates.6 That figure disappears entirely when the business closes. Not partially. Entirely. And permanently, if the premises is not replaced — which, as the independent count makes clear, it often isn’t. A permanently closed restaurant is not a neutral event for the public finances. It is a ten-year fiscal hole of roughly £1.8 million.

A reasonable objection sits here and it deserves to be addressed. A closed restaurant in Shoreditch probably sends its guests somewhere else in Shoreditch, and the VAT follows them. A closed restaurant in a Cornish fishing village doesn't. The methodology accounts for this — a heavier substitution haircut in dense urban markets, a lighter one where alternatives don't exist. After those conservative blended assumptions, the net fiscal loss from insolvencies recorded between 2022 and 2024 runs to approximately £609m a year.7

That £609m is not a one-off. It is the annual cost of those closures — every year, recurring, for as long as those businesses stay closed. Which is permanently. And the figure doesn't hold still. Each subsequent wave of insolvencies adds another layer on top: more absent VAT, more absent employment taxes, more absent business rates, compounding annually. At the current trajectory, every year of inaction adds roughly £300m to the permanent shortfall. By year ten, the sector is generating somewhere north of £3 billion less per year than it was in 2022. Not a hangover from a bad period. A structural gap — one that doesn't close when conditions improve, because the businesses that would have closed it no longer exist.

To my knowledge, no government body has attempted to model what this wave of failure costs in aggregate. The OBR has costed the temporary VAT relief. The Treasury cites forgone revenue. HMRC publishes its recovery rates. Nobody seems to have put them in the same room. The Treasury is not protecting £4.9bn by maintaining 20%. It is watching a larger number accumulate, quietly, one closed business at a time.

The human cost

The insolvency figures measure businesses. Behind each one is a workforce, and the fiscal consequences of that workforce losing its jobs haven’t been counted either.

When a job disappears, the Exchequer loses the tax it was generating and can gain a welfare liability it wasn’t carrying before.8

A full-time hospitality worker generates around £7,125 a year in combined income tax and National Insurance. Part-time workers — around 60% of the sector’s workforce — generate less individually but there are more of them. Across the 89,000 jobs lost since the October 2024 Budget, the combined annual tax loss runs to approximately £310m.9

The welfare cost is real but deliberately conservative. Not every displaced worker claims Universal Credit — students, workers in dual-income households, and a structural gap between the claimant count and the ONS unemployment measure all reduce the eligible pool. Modelled on cautious uptake assumptions across the sector’s full and part-time mix, the estimated UC liability runs to around £137m a year.

The third channel is less commonly counted: when a worker’s income falls sharply, so does their spending, and with it the VAT that spending was generating. The net figure, modelled correctly, adds a further £22m a year.10

Three channels. Approximately £469m a year in fiscal cost from employment alone.

The strongest objection is substitution: when a restaurant closes, its guests don’t stop eating out. They spend elsewhere, and the VAT follows them. It’s a legitimate point, and it applies with real force to the business-level figures. A closed restaurant in Bristol may simply redirect its former guests to other Bristol restaurants, and much of the VAT goes with them. What it doesn’t touch is the employment cost. The job is gone regardless of where the guests eat next.

The £469m and the £609m are derived separately and cover overlapping ground — some of the job losses counted in the first figure will have come from the closures counted in the second. They should not be added together. What can be said is that each represents a cost absent from any Treasury analysis of the sector’s VAT rate. None of it has been counted. None of it appears in any model that currently informs government policy on this question.

The balance

The argument here is not against taxation — VAT raised £168 billion in 2023-24 and the public finances depend on it. This is about whether 20%, applied to hospitality, in these conditions, produces the best sustainable outcome for both the Exchequer and the economy it draws from.

The IFS’s position — uniform rate, broaden the base, compensate households directly — is internally coherent. It’s also politically unrealisable. No government has shown the appetite to impose VAT on children’s clothing, books, or basic food. Britain already operates a partially differentiated system. The question is not whether to have reduced rates but whether hospitality belongs among the exceptions.

The IFS critique of reduced rates — that savings are captured by operators rather than passed to consumers — only makes sense if you believe operators have meaningful margin to protect. They don’t. The average UK restaurant runs at 4.2% profit margin. These are not businesses hoarding windfalls. These are businesses where a burst pipe in January or an unexpected rent review tips a viable operation toward insolvency. When critics say operators “captured” a VAT saving, they are describing something real through the wrong frame. At 4% margin, there’s nothing to capture. There’s only the question of whether the business survives to trade next quarter. An operator who retains half a VAT saving and passes half to guests has done something useful with both halves — the retained portion goes into the gap between survival and failure, the passed-through portion reduces the price of eating out for the people who depend on it.11

Even at the lower end of the evidence — the 18% France figure the IFS cites — guests still pay less and operators retain something. At 4% margin, that retained portion is a bit of extra profit. But profit in a business model this thin isn’t an indulgence — it’s what keeps the lights on in February, replaces the oven that breaks in October, and gives the head chef a reason not to leave.

A reduced rate would require a definitional boundary — what qualifies as hospitality and what doesn’t? European countries have managed differentiated rates for fifteen years without significant distortion. That complexity is a cost of implementation, not a reason to reject the policy.

The scale also matters beyond cities. Hospitality accounts for one in twelve jobs nationally, rising to one in five or six in coastal, rural, and visitor-dependent regions where alternative employment is scarce.12 The closure of a restaurant in Shoreditch is visible and mourned. The closure of the only pub-restaurant in a coastal town in Cornwall removes something that doesn’t come back. The distributional case for a reduced rate isn’t only about operator margins. It’s about which communities bear the cost when the numbers stops working.

Germany has reached this conclusion. Ireland has reached it. France reached it fifteen years ago. They each decided that hospitality was worth differentiating — that the employment and economic activity the sector generates justified a lower rate — and made it permanent. In each case the decision was framed not as a concession to industry but as a recognition that the prevailing rate was working against the Exchequer’s own long-term interests.

Britain’s Treasury looks at hospitality and sees forgone revenue. We look back and sees a rate that is slowly consuming the industry it’s supposed to tax.

What the alternative actually looks like

The proposal is a permanent reduction to 12.5% — the rate the UK itself operated between October 2021 and March 2022. This isn’t a theoretical experiment. Businesses planned around it, priced against it, and traded under it. The rate exists in the historical record.

On a 40% pass-through assumption — meaning 40% of the saving reaches customers as lower prices, conservative and in line with the academic literature — a restaurant reducing its prices passes roughly 67p back to guests on a £30 main course. The operator retains the remainder: around £1 per dish, applied directly against a margin currently too thin to absorb equipment failures, rent reviews, or NI increases without repricing. The sector’s average net margin moves from around 5% to around 9% of net revenue. Not lavish. But viable. The difference between a business that can weather a bad January and one that cannot.

The Treasury’s objection will be the cost.

In year one, a reduction to 12.5% costs the Exchequer approximately £5.6bn in gross VAT receipts, partially offset by savings elsewhere in the public finances — employment taxes on stabilised jobs, corporation tax on improved margins, welfare costs avoided. Net year-one cost: approximately £4.9bn.13

That’s a serious number at a serious time. The case for absorbing it isn’t that it doesn’t matter — it’s that the alternative is not the £4.9bn staying in the public finances. It’s the £4.9bn leaving anyway, in smaller instalments, as the base it’s drawn from continues to shrink.

The Treasury’s analysis compares 12.5% against a stable 20% base. That stable base doesn’t exist. The sector is contracting. The VAT it generates at 20% is already falling and will continue to fall. A better comparison is a reduced rate on a recovering base against a full rate on a shrinking one — and on that comparison, the two lines eventually meet. When they cross depends on how fast the sector contracts under the status quo, and how strongly it recovers under reform. Both are genuinely uncertain, but the table below sets out the range, with assumptions stated so you can assess them rather than accept a single number.14

The base case asks for nothing heroic. It uses the actual five-year contraction rate and the most cautious end of the academic literature on price elasticity. The bullish and optimistic scenarios use the recovery rates Ireland and France actually posted after their own cuts. The conservative scenario asks for less than any of that — barely any contraction, barely any recovery — and still eventually crosses.

Year 37 is, admittedly, a long time to wait. It’s worth noting that Hinkley Point C — approved in 2016 at an estimated £18 billion, now projected at £48 billion, coming online around 2030 on a 60-year operating contract whose value the NAO acknowledged wouldn’t be known for decades — didn’t prompt a single Treasury minister to say the payback horizon was too uncertain to proceed. The strategic case was considered sufficient. Nobody demanded a ten-year breakeven before picking up their tools.

The proposal itself isn’t complicated. A defined rate — 12.5%. A statutory commitment to review at three years. Ireland ran exactly this experiment from 2011: tested it, reviewed it, extended it, briefly removed it in 2019 to see what happened, watched what happened, restored it, and has now legislated it permanently from July 2026.15 Fifteen years. Three governments. No reversion. France has operated 10% since 2014. Germany moved to 7% permanently from January this year. None of them waited for a cumulative breakeven model before acting. They looked at the trajectory and made a decision about which direction they wanted it to go.

The Treasury has modelled year one. It hasn’t modelled year eleven, or year eighteen — the years in which, on the base case, the reform has already paid for itself and is generating more revenue than the status quo would have. That omission is not a technical oversight. It’s a choice: count what the rate reduction costs, decline to count what the current rate is costing, and present the difference as analysis. The closed restaurants, the lost jobs, the 5p in the pound — none of it appears in the model that informs the decision. It’s been left out, and the sector keeps paying the price of its absence.

Back to the plate

The £30 main course is back on the table.

£5 to HMRC, before anything else. Food cost. The person who cooked it, the person who carried it, the person who will wash the plate. Rent, rates, energy, insurance. Then, if things have gone well, something small left over.

The number on the menu isn’t a price. It’s a settlement — between what things cost, what the state requires, and what a guest will pay.

The guest sees £30 and draws conclusions about value, about greed, about whether this place is worth it. They don’t see the settlement. They don’t see the rate that was set, the industry it’s consuming, the businesses it’s closing, or the arithmetic that says the current arrangement costs the Exchequer more than the alternative over any horizon longer than a parliamentary term.

The tax is invisible by design. So, it seems, is the cost of keeping it where it is.

If you would like part two delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free, and I would love to have you along. If this topic interests you, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments—and if you are more economically inclined than I am, your perspective would be genuinely welcome. I am making the argument as an operator, not an economist, and I am happy to be challenged.

A schnitzel sits on the menu for £30. It’s printed clearly, without footnotes or addendums. The guest sees £30. What they don’t see—and what almost nobody thinks about—is that £5 of that was never mine.

Before a single penny goes to pay for the working parts—wages, ingredients, utilities, rent—£5 belongs to HMRC. Your food arrives at the table, seasoned generously with public policy.

What the hell is VAT?

Value Added Tax—VAT for short—is charged at 20% on most hospitality food and drink in the UK. Businesses collect it on the government’s behalf, hold it, and remit it quarterly. The mechanics are straightforward. Every pound of gross revenue is one-sixth tax. Not one-fifth, as is commonly touted. A £120 bill is £100 of revenue, and £20 of VAT.

The VAT registration threshold—the point at which a business must register and start collecting—sits at £90,000 of rolling 12-month taxable turnover. At that level, the UK has the joint-highest threshold in the OECD.1

VAT is supposed to be a tax on consumption—neutral, in theory, to the businesses that collect it, because they reclaim the VAT paid on their inputs and only remit the difference. For most businesses, this works reasonably well. A manufacturer buys materials, pays VAT on them, reclaims it, charges VAT on finished goods, remits the net. The tax flows through. The business is a conduit.

Hospitality breaks this model in two specific ways.

The first: its primary input is labour, and labour carries no VAT. There is nothing to reclaim on wages. In a sector where staff costs typically represent 35–40% of revenue, this alone limits the conduit model significantly.

The second: most food purchases are zero-rated. A restaurant buying ingredients from a supplier pays no VAT on them—which sounds like a benefit, but means there is also nothing to reclaim. The input credit that makes VAT theoretically neutral simply doesn’t exist for a hospitality business’s two largest costs. What remains reclaimable—VAT on energy, equipment, packaging, some beverages—represents a fraction of total outgoings.

The result is a business that collects 20% on every pound of food and drink sold, has almost nothing to offset against it, and remits the gap in full. The effective tax burden on value genuinely added is higher in hospitality than in almost any other sector. It is the structural reason a 20% rate lands differently here than elsewhere.

The Cliff Edge

Picture two cafés on the same street.

The first turns over £85,000 a year. At this level, VAT registration isn’t required. The pricing is simple. The cost plus the viable margin goes on the menu. There are no quarterly returns, no software configurations, no hidden arithmetic.

The second turns over £95,000. Now, they need to register. They have two choices; raise prices by 20% and risk losing customers, or absorb the tax and make a lower margin. Neither option is positive. The first feels punitive to guests, who now have to cough up 20% extra for the same coffee they were drinking a week ago, and the second can compress margins to an unsustainable level.

Some businesses do something else entirely. They restrict their turnover. They stay below £90,000 revenue. They reduce their opening hours, they close for a few weeks in the summer, they turn down opportunities. This isn’t simply hypothetical. HMRC’s own research has documented what economists call “bunching”—an abnormal clustering of businesses just below the registration threshold.2 When systems are designed, they incentivise behaviour, particularly when there’s a cliff edge. The businesses sitting at £88,000 of turnover aren’t failing. They’re being rational.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

A restaurant with £1,000,000 in gross annual turnover sounds substantial. It sounds like a business that’s made it.

Remove the VAT. That’s £833,333 in net revenue. Then subtract food cost—typically 28–32% of net revenue for a full-service restaurant. Call it 30%: £250,000 gone. Labour: another 35–40%. Call it £291,667. Then rent, business rates, energy, insurance, merchant fees. The numbers compress quickly. The average net profit margin across UK restaurants was 4.2% in 2024. For full-service independents—the kind most people picture when they think of a restaurant—it typically runs at 3–5%.3

The word “million” changes meaning once you’ve done the arithmetic. What sounds like abundance is, in practice, a business operating on extremely thin clearance. A £1,000,000 restaurant might retain £40,000–£50,000 net. It’s not a complaint—margins reflect the model, and hospitality has always operated this way. But it is worth understanding when you look at the menu price. Much of that number is load-bearing in ways that are invisible from the other side of the table.

A Tax on the High Streets, Peculiar in the Spreadsheets

VAT is not just a percentage. It’s also a collection of definitions. And definitions, in Britain, can get very strange indeed.

Take coffee. A takeaway hot coffee attracts 20% VAT. A takeaway iced coffee is zero-rated. The same espresso, the same machine, a different tax treatment depending on whether the milk is warm. For a business, this is not simply academic: it requires EPOS categorisation, menu structuring, periodic reconciliation.

Have you ever been into a bakery and bought a sausage roll? Have you ever asked them if they could heat it up, and they said no? Perhaps the last time you visited, it was fresh from the oven, and it was oh so much better, and now, these bastards are insisting you eat your sausage roll cold. The reason, my friends, is VAT.

Baked and left to cool: zero-rated. Kept warm in a heated cabinet: 20%. Reheated to order: 20%. The distinction hinges on the intention to serve hot.4 Equipment decisions—cabinet specifications, holding temperatures—are therefore, in part, tax decisions. A bakery choosing not to install a warming unit is making a VAT calculation alongside a commercial one.

And it gets better: take your cold sausage roll out the door, and no VAT applies at all. Sit down at one of their tables to eat it, and you’ve just triggered 20%. Same pastry. Same filling. Same bakery. Different chair.

Then, there’s my favourite example (sad that I have a favourite). The Jaffa Cake. Is it a cake, or is it a biscuit? Who actually cares? You know who really cares…HMRC.

In 1991, United Biscuits (McVitie’s) appeared before a VAT tribunal to contest HMRC’s reclassification of Jaffa Cakes from zero-rated cakes to standard-rated chocolate-covered biscuits. The tribunal found in McVitie’s favour. One of the deciding factors: a Jaffa Cake goes hard when stale, as cakes do, rather than soft, as biscuits do. The structural behaviour of a cooling sponge carried multimillion-pound tax implications. McVitie’s reportedly produced a 30cm giant Jaffa Cake as courtroom evidence.5

These aren’t just footnotes. The temperature of a pastry, the ambition of a warming cabinet, the staleness behaviour of a sponge—each is a margin decision dressed as a product decision. The complexity is real, the administrative burden is real, and the consequences of misclassification are real.

The Experiment

Between July 2020 and April 2022, the government ran what amounts to the closest thing we have to a live trial. VAT on hospitality was cut first to 5%, then stepped to 12.5%, before returning to 20%. The stated aim was survival: keep the sector breathing through the pandemic and its aftermath.

The total cost to the Exchequer was over £8 billion.6 What did that buy?

Some prices fell. ONS data recorded a 5.7% month-on-month drop in catering prices between July and August 2020, though this coincided with the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, making the VAT cut’s individual contribution difficult to separate. Academic research found pass-through of around 20–50%, peaking briefly then fading within months.7 The landmark Benzarti and Carloni study of France’s 2009 restaurant VAT cut found that only around 18% of the saving reached consumers in lower prices. The IFS has cited this in arguing that reduced VAT rates are an inefficient policy tool.

It’s a reasonable observation. It’s also, as we will see, only half the picture.

As for closures—formal insolvency statistics were mechanically suppressed by government restrictions on winding-up petitions until March 2022, making it impossible to cleanly isolate the VAT cut’s effect. What we know is that 9,930 licensed premises closed permanently in 2020 alone, and that once legal protections ended, insolvencies surged sharply. It’s ambiguous, at best, but it doesn’t necessarily resolve in the Treasury’s favour.

The Comparison

Let’s look at what Britain’s neighbours have decided.

France has charged 10% VAT on restaurant food since 2014, having first cut to 5.5% in 2009 as an explicit jobs policy. Spain and Italy both apply 10% to restaurant services. Ireland—which cut to 9% in 2011, removed it in 2019, restored it temporarily during Covid—passed legislation in late 2025 reinstating a permanent 9% rate from July 2026. Germany, which let its temporary 7% pandemic rate expire in January 2024 and reverted to 19%, has since legislated a permanent 7% rate on restaurant food effective January 2026.8

Denmark charges 25% with no reduction, and has a thriving restaurant culture. It also has average wages and a cost structure that make the comparison fairly academic.

The direction of travel is clear. Most of Europe levies hospitality VAT at 7–13%. Britain, at 20% flat, will shortly find itself standing almost alone. Different countries have made different decisions about how to treat hospitality within their tax systems. Britain has made one too. The question worth asking is whether ours is still the right one.

Two posts down: “Unreal pasta at Carluccio’s.” Four heart-eye emojis. The full complement.

Now. I want to be clear that I have no particular quarrel with Carluccio’s. I have eaten in worse places with better press. I have eaten in worse places, full stop, and been grateful. The point isn’t the pasta. The point is that I’d been about to file her praise under “evidence” when it is, at best, goodwill—and goodwill, while lovely, is not the same thing as taste.

The trap, if you’re running a restaurant and you let yourself fall into it, is this: you treat praise as data and criticism as noise. In reality they’re different sides of the same coin.

The internet has been extremely good at making everyone feel entitled to a microphone and extremely bad at explaining that owning a microphone is not the same as having something worth amplifying. This is not a new problem. People have always had opinions about restaurants. What’s new is the infrastructure—the elegant, friction-free pipeline from half-formed feeling to published verdict. You used to have to tell your friends. Now you can tell everyone’s friends, and Google will file it forever.

Restaurants are a particular target for this because they’re intimate in a way that, say, a sewage treatment plant isn’t. You sit inside the thing we’ve made. You eat it. It touches your mouth. That is a luxury bestowed on very few industries. This creates a remarkably convincing illusion of expertise. People leave a restaurant feeling they understand it in some essential way, the way you might feel you understand a country after a long weekend.

Most people seem to conflate food criticism with restaurant criticism. They are not the same discipline. They share a postcode. They occasionally borrow a cup of sugar. They are not the same.

Food criticism is, at its core, sensory. Is the fish cooked? Is the sauce balanced? Does the thing on the plate make internal sense? A brilliant home cook can do this. A mediocre home cook with a functioning palate and the nerve to say so can do this. You don’t need a press pass to notice that something is oversalted.

Restaurant criticism is something else. It’s the whole beast. The room, the economics, the pacing, the labour model behind the service, the decisions embedded in a wine list, what the music is trying to say about who you’re supposed to be while you’re sitting in it. It requires understanding restaurants not as experiences but as systems—systems that are, almost universally, running on the acceptable side of catastrophe. The compromises are invisible to the guest and obvious to anyone who’s ever tried to open on a Tuesday after two members of staff rang in sick and the fish delivery arrived two hours late and slightly warm.

The line between a serious restaurant critic and someone who just really likes going to restaurants is, from the outside, almost invisible. Both write about meals. Both have opinions. The difference is not usually fluency. Some of the most beautifully written restaurant pieces I’ve read were penned by people who had absolutely no idea what they were looking at, like a non-swimmer writing rapturously about the view from the high board.

Authority, in any field, accrues through understanding, not proximity. If I walked onto a building site and started holding forth about the quality of the electrical wiring, the electrician would not engage me in debate. He’d look at me the way you look at a dog that’s trying to open a door—sympathetic, briefly, then past it (or he’d punch me and then ask for a cup of tea with eight sugars). My confidence would not compensate for the fact that I know nothing about wiring. My sincerity, similarly, is neither here nor there.

What the internet has specifically done is collapse the distance between having an opinion and broadcasting it, which sounds like progress and is, in many respects, a disaster. Eat meal. Have feeling. Assign stars. The whole process takes less time than digestion and carries, in the mind of the person doing it, equivalent weight to a considered piece of criticism that took someone three visits and two weeks to write.

I’ve had, in a single service, one guest tell me the fish was too fishy and another tell me it wasn’t fishy enough. I’ve had someone tell me the chocolate dessert was too rich, which seems to me a category error, like complaining that the sea is too wet. These are not critiques. They are autobiographies, filed under the wrong genre.

The insidious thing is the grammatical drift: from “I didn’t like this” to “this is bad.” The first is honest and fine. The second requires equipment most people haven’t got. The difference between taste and judgement is the whole difference, and conflating them is how you end up with four stars on a Google review reading: “Food was amazing but I don’t know why they play jazz.”

A guest once remarked that our wine markups were excessive because he’d found the same bottle in Italy for twelve euros. I didn’t reply, for the same reason you don’t explain to someone why the NHS costs more than a packet of paracetamol from a supermarket. The concepts involved—importation, duty, VAT, storage, breakage, the tying up of cash in stock that might sit in a cellar for two years before someone orders it—were not going to survive the conversation. He wasn’t being stupid. He just didn’t know what he was looking at, and had mistaken the confidence of his ignorance for the rigour of his research.

This is forgivable. I don’t know how to service a boiler. I have opinions about whether my boiler is working, but I have the good sense not to explain to the engineer that I’ve found the parts cheaper on the internet.

So who counts? Where’s the line?

The honest answer is that the line isn’t a credential. It’s not a newspaper column or a following or a verified tick. It’s two things, and the first is knowledge—not taste, knowledge. Not “I have eaten in many restaurants” but “I understand how restaurants work, why they make the decisions they make, what the constraints look like from the inside, why the menu changed, why the service model shifted, why the wine list is shorter than it was.” That kind of knowledge takes time. It takes curiosity rather than appetite, which is a different thing entirely, though the two are often confused.

Some of the sharpest restaurant minds I’ve encountered didn’t start with any formal training. They were obsessive civilians who asked questions and read widely and ate with the specific intention of learning rather than just enjoying. The enjoyment is a by-product. The work is the understanding. At some point that accumulates into something you can legitimately call authority. Until then, it’s enthusiasm, which is valuable and not the same thing.

The second thing is intent. Why are you writing this? What does the piece exist to do?

There is a kind of restaurant writing that is trying, genuinely, to describe and interrogate and improve things—that holds restaurants to a standard and explains why the standard matters and helps readers make better decisions and occasionally makes operators uncomfortable in a useful way. That’s criticism. It can be savage. A.A. Gill could be savage in ways that were so precise they were almost surgical, which is very different from being savage in ways that are just loud.

And then there’s the other kind, where the restaurant is essentially a backdrop for a self-portrait. The meal exists to demonstrate that the writer is the sort of person who goes to meals. The prose is not about the food; it’s about the writer’s relationship with food, their refined sensibility, their willingness to try the tasting menu, their forbearance in the face of slow service. The restaurant is a prop. You are reading, at some length, about someone’s idea of themselves. This is also not criticism. It is memoir, wearing criticism’s coat without permission.

Normal guests occupy a third category, which is the largest and the most complicated, because they have the biggest megaphone and the least idea they’re holding one.

Last week I hosted a dinner at BANK with the Good Food Guide—a dozen chefs and restaurateurs. We ended up, as you do when you put operators in a room together and give them wine, talking about Google reviews. The consensus was near-unanimous and immediate: none of them read them (they were horrified to hear that I read every piece of feedback we get). Not because they’re above it. Because they’ve made peace with the fundamental mismatch between what guests experience and what operators are actually trying to do. The feedback that would be genuinely useful requires a fluency most guests don’t have and shouldn’t be expected to have. Guests come to be looked after. That’s entirely the point.

That said—and this is important—some guests do give feedback worth taking. We have regulars who have been eating with us long enough to understand what we’re trying to be, which means when something is wrong and they say so, it lands like information rather than a verdict. The note stings, but it improves. A few of them, if they’d gone a different way, would probably make very good critics. The difference is that they know what they’re criticising, rather than just that they didn’t like it.

We’ve had some videos go around on Instagram recently. Jack demonstrating technique—practical stuff, clearly explained, the kind of thing that is generous. The algorithm decided it liked them and so they reached people who had not previously known we existed, which is, in theory, a good thing.

These people were not happy to meet us.

There is a specific type of person who materialises whenever a piece of food content reaches a wide enough audience: someone who has never cooked professionally, never run a service, never had to make something consistently for paying guests under time pressure, and yet has arrived with the certainty of a hanging judge. They don’t say “I would do this differently.” They say “this is wrong”—with a confidence that only becomes possible when you have no skin in the game and no understanding of the stakes.

One man told us Jack’s fried chicken technique amounted to an act of cultural appropriation so severe he compared it to a slur. I’m choosing to move past this quickly, on the grounds that engaging with it at length would imply it deserved engagement.

The more routine stuff—béchamel critiques, plating opinions, technique corrections delivered in the tone of a disappointed examiner—almost never comes from working chefs or restaurateurs. The people who actually know things tend to comment in an entirely different register: warm, specific, occasionally technically useful, often just, “nice work”. The ones who have done the thing understand that doing the thing is hard. The ones who haven’t, don’t.

Jack’s standard response, when someone tells him he’s doing something wrong, is to ask how many people are currently paying to eat at their restaurant. It’s slightly petty and completely correct. Not because commercial success is a proxy for quality—it isn’t—but because it establishes whether the person criticising has ever submitted their taste to the discipline of consequence. An opinion held by someone with nothing at stake is a different object from an opinion held by someone who has wagered on it.

My working rule, which I arrived at through approximately ten years of getting this wrong, is that I don’t weight criticism from someone I wouldn’t also ask for advice. The test is whether, if something went seriously sideways at my restaurants, I’d pick up the phone and call this person. If the answer is no, their opinion—however sincerely held, however fluently expressed—is not really a useful data point. It’s a data point about their experience of the restaurant, which is interesting in the way that weather is interesting, but not something you build on from the ground up.

The best critics—the ones who have genuinely earned the designation—are rare and they are honest and they understand both what they’re looking at and what it costs to make it. When they are kind, you feel it. When they are not, you learn something. At their best, they make you feel the restaurant has been held to account by someone who cares, which is a completely different sensation from being reviewed by someone who simply didn’t enjoy themselves and wants the record to reflect this.

Everyone else—the bloggers, the Googlers, the Instagram commenters, the woman who loved us and Carluccio’s with equal and therefore meaningless sincerity—gets the same pinch of salt. Not because they’re wrong to have opinions. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, in the same way everyone is entitled to their dreams. You just don’t run a restaurant on them.

They’re a mood. Typed loudly. Filed forever.

It’s the sort of issue that becomes visible only when it threatens to get worse. Most of the time, it sits in the background like a low-grade headache: there, irritating, vaguely accepted as part of the deal. And because it’s called business rates, it sounds like a tax on business performance—on success, on turnover, on the act of making money. It isn’t.

A couple of years ago, this was energy. The contract that used to earn nothing more than a cursory glance and a scribble in the signature box suddenly demanded serious attention—unit rates, standing charges, contract lengths, break clauses, the small print that could bankrupt you.

Now it’s business rates. Same pattern. Something that sat quietly in the background has walked to the front of the room and demanded to be taken seriously.

Part of why it’s flared up again is timing. Revaluations reshuffle what each property is deemed to be worth, and the reliefs that have softened the blow for hospitality in recent years have started to feel less like policy and more like a yearly suspense thriller. Even if you don’t follow the minutiae, you feel the edge of it: the sense that a cost you can’t control is about to move.

I’ve always understood Council Tax.

At home, you hand over your chunk of money and the place functions. The bins get collected. The streetlights come on. The park doesn’t turn into a thicket. It’s not perfect, but you can see the shape of the transaction. Pay in, get a neighbourhood back.

Business rates are sold as the commercial cousin of that. The same idea wearing a tie. You occupy space, you contribute to the local ecosystem that makes that space viable. I don’t hate the principle. I like the idea that businesses help fund the plumbing of a town: roads, safety, cleaning, the unsexy stuff that stops civilisation sliding sideways.

But in hospitality, the comparison falls apart the moment you actually run the numbers. Because business rates land like a bill for services you still end up buying privately.

Before we get into why that makes restaurant people furious, it helps to know what rates actually are, mechanically—because once you understand how they work, you understand why they can feel so detached from reality.

Business rates (National Non-Domestic Rates, if we’re being painfully official) are a property tax on commercial premises. They’re charged on the building, not your profit. That’s the first thing to lodge in your head. You could be having your best year, your worst year, or haemorrhaging into the carpet—the rates don’t care.

The calculation starts with a number called the Rateable Value. This is the Valuation Office Agency’s estimate of what your property could have been rented for on the open market at a particular point in time. Not what you do pay in rent, necessarily—it’s their assessed rental value, based on the local market, the size, the use, the frontage, the whole vibe of the space.

That Rateable Value gets multiplied by a nationally set figure called the multiplier—also known as “pence in the pound”. The simplest version is:

Rates bill = Rateable Value × multiplier

A crude example: if a property is given a Rateable Value of £30,000, and the multiplier is roughly 50p in the pound, you’re looking at about £15,000 a year before any reliefs. If the Rateable Value is £50,000, it’s nearer £25,000 a year. That’s a full-time salary. You don’t need to be a spreadsheet romantic to see how quickly that becomes a staffing decision.

Then come the reliefs and adjustments: small business relief, hospitality relief, rural relief, charitable relief, empty property relief. Some are automatic, some require applications, some change with budgets, and some come with caps and conditions that make planning feel like building a house while someone keeps moving the ground.

Then there’s revaluation. Every so often, the government revalues non-domestic properties to bring Rateable Values closer to current rental markets. Which sounds reasonable until you live through it and realise it means your tax base can jump even if your business hasn’t changed at all. Your menu can be the same, your team can be the same, your dining room can be the same—but if your area gets “hot”, if rents go up, if the local economy shifts, your Rateable Value changes, and so does the bill.

You can appeal. In theory. In practice, it’s a process that takes time, energy, and a tolerance for admin that most operators only develop through repeated exposure to suffering.

So the system is not “pay X for Y services.” It’s “your building is deemed to be worth this much in rent; therefore you owe this much in tax.” A tax on occupying space. Not on doing well in it.

And now we can talk about the bins.

At home, you wheel something to the kerb and it disappears. In a restaurant, waste is a whole second business running parallel to your own. Food waste. Glass. Dry Mixed Recycling. General. Collections timed around deliveries and service. “We can’t take that because it’s contaminated.” “We can’t take that because it’s too heavy.” “We can take that, but it’s an extra charge.” It’s a set of rules and invoices and missed collections that you can’t afford to ignore because, unlike a slow Tuesday, rubbish doesn’t wait for a better week.

I pay nearly £10,000 a year for private bin companies. Ten grand. For the privilege of not living inside my own refuse. And I pay it whether trade is booming or miserable, because waste doesn’t negotiate with your P&L.

So then the business rates bill turns up and you’re left holding two thoughts at once.

One: this is supposed to be the commercial equivalent of Council Tax—my contribution to the local machine.

Two: I’m still paying separately for the basic, physical reality of running a restaurant.

Business rates help fund local government. Councils pay for adult social care, safeguarding, housing services, public health, roads, planning—all the stuff that holds the social fabric together. I’m not arguing against taxation. I’m arguing against the experience of it—the way it feels to someone running a place where the margins are thin and the overheads are anything but.

Because hospitality is already paying for the right to exist in about nine different ways.

We pay rent. We pay VAT on what we sell. We pay employers’ costs. We pay energy bills. We pay insurance, licensing, compliance, maintenance—the endless drip of things breaking because humans use them. We pay to staff the room properly, which is both a moral and commercial necessity, and also one of the biggest costs in the entire equation.

And then, because we’re a physical business, we also pay a property tax that doesn’t care whether the dining room was half full or packed to the rafters. Business rates are a fixed overhead. They behave like rent: blunt, regular, indifferent.

And because they’re fixed, they force a very particular kind of behaviour. If the rates bill goes up, you don’t magically sell 10% more covers to compensate. You start shaving.

Lunch suddenly looks like an expensive hobby. Mondays become riddled with doubt. You become less willing to carry anything on the menu that isn’t a reliable seller. You tighten portion sizes, you reduce prep, you simplify. You delay hiring. You stretch rotas. You postpone maintenance you know you shouldn’t postpone.

Or you put prices up—not because you’ve discovered greed, but because maths has entered the room and refused to leave.

And here’s the perverse bit: rates penalise the very things that make hospitality hospitable. Space you’re proud of—accessible loos, a kitchen that can actually cook, a dining room with enough room to breathe—is space you’re taxed on. A better guest experience often means a higher fixed cost base. That’s not a moral argument, it’s just how the incentive structure lands.

They don’t flex with the weather, or roadworks, or a cost-of-living wobble, or a local office closing, or the fact that January is January and January always turns up empty-handed.

When you’re inside it, that indifference is the point. It makes rates reliable revenue for the state. But it’s also why they can feel like punishment. A restaurant can have a slow month for reasons entirely outside its control—and business rates will still come in with their hand out, perfectly calm, like the building itself has more rights than the business inside it.

Paying rates as a hospitality operator feels slightly absurd, because, in a way, we already return something special to our community.

Restaurants keep high streets alive after 6pm. We provide third spaces that aren’t churches or gyms. We host birthdays and breakups and first dates and quiet Tuesday dinners that people needed more than they realised. We create entry-level jobs that—when the industry is healthy—turn into real careers. We feed people. We give a city somewhere to be.

We do all of that, and then we get billed for the privilege of taking up space, and we’re still privately paying for the basics of keeping that space hygienic and safe.

Council Tax feels like membership of a functioning neighbourhood: imperfect, but recognisable.

Business rates, in hospitality at least, feel like being charged admission to your own workplace—and then being asked to buy the drinks separately.

The bins will still be rattling at the end of service, the glass still clinking, the cardboard still piled by the back door. Tomorrow morning, a private company will—hopefully—come and take it away because you’ve paid them to. And somewhere in the background of all that, a tax bill will sit quietly on the desk, reminding you that the state is also your landlord.

I don’t mind paying my way. I mind paying twice for the same idea, and still being the only one sweeping the pavement.

Not the glamorous version of “a treat”. Not the birthday version. The other one. The Tuesday-at-one-thirty version, when you’re carrying the weight of a week that’s already overreached, and you need someone else to hold the world for a bit.

A good restaurant doesn’t start with a question. It starts with a recognition.

“Hello,” they say. Not, “Have you got a booking?”

It’s a small distinction, but it’s everything. In one word you’re a person; in the other you’re a code to be reconciled with a screen. The best hosts look at you first and their iPad second, like the thing glowing in their hands exists to help them do their job, not replace the act of noticing. They glance down only long enough to confirm what they already know in their bones: we can make space for you.

A table for one, at the bar, if that’s alright?

Of course it’s alright. In fact it’s perfect. A solo lunch at the bar is one of the great, underrated civilisations. Your back to the room, your front to the theatre. The low clatter of service. The little paper cough of the ticket printer. That constant, unglamorous heartbeat of a restaurant that’s alive and getting on with it.

They hand you the menu, and it’s small in the way that gives you confidence. Not small because it can’t do more, but small because it’s chosen not to. Clean type. A few lines. Restrained enough to feel like an invitation, not a negotiation.

“Still or sparkling?”

“Sparkling, please.”

Sparkling water is a strange indulgence in the UK—not because it’s expensive, but because at home it feels performative. I’m not opening a bottle of San Pellegrino to sit on my sofa and answer emails. In a restaurant, it makes sense. That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? Restaurants are where you get to borrow someone else’s standards for a couple of hours. You can indulge in things you can’t justify at home: an ingredient you wouldn’t buy for yourself, a technique you wouldn’t bother attempting, or—the most underrated luxury of all—time. Not time to consume, but time to be looked after while you do nothing useful.

At home, my hands stay clean. My mind stays busy. I chop, I tidy, I check the clock, I half-listen to something I don’t really want to watch, and it all feels like management. Restaurants are where hands get messy in pursuit of something beautiful, and where your mind gets permission to be a little messier too—to soften, to drift, to stop organising itself into bullet points.

The menu sits there like a dare. You’re not starving, but you want to taste. A taste of everything would be perfect. Which, obviously, is just a tasting menu. The only problem is that I lack the relevant self-control. One bite turns into another bite turns into “oh, go on then”. It’s not gluttony so much as the physics of pleasure: good food makes you want more of itself. It’s practically a design feature.

They take your order in a little pad—the old-fashioned ritual, the scribble, the shorthand that makes it feel like something is being made for you rather than processed through you. And you see it in their eyes, that half-second of professional warmth that says: I’ve got you.

Then they step away, and you’re left in the cocoon.

That’s the magic part. The period of nothing. The space between ordering and eating, where you can decide what kind of person you’re going to be for the next two hours. Thumb-scroller? Page-reader? Ceiling-starer? Someone who stares at the room and pretends they’re not listening to anyone, while actually absorbing the whole soundtrack of lunch?

Sometimes my mind wanders straight back to work, like a dog returning to its vomit. The to-do list arrives at the table before the first course. You think about the meeting you shouldn’t miss, the email you haven’t answered, the thing you promised you’d do that keeps turning itself into a moral failing.

And then the plate lands, with that soft, precise placement that says: this matters now. Your attention snaps back to the room like a magnet finding metal. You are here. Present. Not wondering.

But the thing in front of you isn’t “present” either, not really. Food carries its past with it. Venison that once bounded across someone else’s landscape. Pecorino that began as milk from a living animal and ended up as something you can shave onto a plate with casual confidence. Watercress pulled from the ground, still plush with its own brightness.

And then the hands. Always the hands. The butcher. The cheesemaker. The prep cook. The chef. The person on pass who wiped the rim because they cared, or because they’re trained to care, or because caring has become instinct. It’s hard not to feel slightly humbled by it all: how many people have to do their job properly for you to have this moment.

I wonder sometimes whether a chef’s gift lives in the mind or the hands. People like to talk about creativity—the vision, the idea—but most of the work is discipline made invisible. Heat controlled. Salt judged. Timing nailed. The same movement repeated so many times it becomes fluent. You eat the result, and it feels like art, but it’s also trade. It’s craft. It’s someone being unreasonably good at something that most of us only ever do half-attentively.

Plates arrive. Plates disappear. You don’t even notice the clearing half the time. That’s not because you’re being ignored; it’s because you’re being handled with care. Service isn’t just friendliness. It’s choreography designed to give you the illusion that everything is easy.

And slowly, without making a big speech about it, the restaurant works on you. It pulls you out of the loop. It interrupts the internal monologue. It lowers the volume on the part of your brain that insists everything must be optimised, accounted for, turned into action. You stop thinking in tasks and start thinking in sensations. Acid. Heat. Crunch. Fat. The little sting of pepper at the end of a bite. The way a glass feels colder than it should. The music you can’t quite place but suddenly want to. Two hours pass without you having to perform your own life.

Then the bill arrives, and you snap back—not harshly, but cleanly. Like waking from a nap you didn’t know you needed.

The problems are still there. The list hasn’t shrunk. If anything, it’s probably grown while you weren’t looking. But you feel different in relation to it. Loosened. Restored. Not fixed—restaurants aren’t therapy—but reminded that you can be held, briefly, by something outside yourself.

That’s what a great restaurant is, at its best: a warm embrace with a receipt at the end.

I keep circling that sentence because the industry still treats it like heresy. Poaching sounds criminal. It implies an ambush. A rival sliding into DMs, waving money, nicking your best chef while your back is turned. It’s a comforting story, but it means the problem lives elsewhere.

It’s hard to steal happy staff. When someone leaves, it’s rarely the offer. It’s the slow accumulation of small cuts, and the offer just arrives last. The leaving started months earlier, in moments that don’t make the highlight reel. The eye contact that lingers a second too long after being shouted at. The apology that never comes. The rota that keeps eating birthdays and weekends with military efficiency. The sense that you’re tolerated, not developed. By the time another restaurant calls, the decision is already rehearsed.

We still cling to the shouty-chef defence because it flatters the kitchen’s mythology, the lazy maths of it all. Pressure equals standards. Anger equals passion. If someone breaks under it, that’s weakness, not evidence. But kitchens aren’t selection trials for suffering. They’re workplaces. Brutal ones sometimes, yes, but still places where humans show up day after day and give something physical, emotional, and irreplaceable. Calling abuse “old school” doesn’t make it noble, it just dates you.

The people who leave first are usually the best ones. The curious ones. The ones with options. The ones who realise that there are other ways to cook good food without feeling small. The ones who realise that being shouted at isn’t a rite of passage, it’s just someone else’s unresolved shit spilling over the pass. What’s left behind gets misread as loyalty. It isn’t. It’s inertia.

Owners then talk about retention as if it’s a contractual problem. Longer notice periods. Training agreements. Loyalty schemes dressed up as care. As if tightening the grip stops people wanting to wriggle free. But retention is culture, not policy. You don’t keep people by making it harder to leave. You keep them by making the room bearable, sometimes even good.

Calm leadership is wildly underrated in this business. So is predictability. So is a head chef who corrects without performing. So is praise that lands publicly, not just criticism. None of this is soft, it’s efficient. Fear burns energy, respect concentrates it.

One night, in the pub after service, Jack told me he’d been offered a job, and I felt the knot before the details. Jack had joined us from day one as Head Chef. Two years later, he’d earned equity in Bank. By that point, we weren’t just colleagues, we were business partners. Another restaurant had approached him. Properly courted him. Big budget. Big promises. The salary alone was eye-watering, around a 70% pay rise. Enough money to make anyone pause. Naturally, he went to have a look.

What he found was familiar. A classic Head Chef pitch. Impressive numbers. Vague hours. No paid overtime. All the confidence in the world that the workload would be ‘manageable’. From experience, he could already see the shape of it. Ninety-hour weeks hiding behind a glossy job ad. Pressure sold as prestige. Toxicity dressed up as ambition.

When he told me why he’d said no, it stuck. Faced with a huge pay bump, he realised he liked what he already had. A forty-hour contract. Overtime paid when things spilled over, with a shared effort not to let that become normal. A rota shaped so he could do the school run on weekdays. He was happy, and more money with a worse life wasn’t going to improve that.

Another time, one of our chefs took a job at another restaurant in Bristol. When I next saw the owner, he apologised to me, almost sheepish. He said he hadn’t realised the chef had come from us. He said he never would have hired him if he’d known. I stopped him straight away. There was nothing to apologise for. That chef had already decided to leave. He wasn’t being smuggled out in the dead of night. He’d handed in his notice of his own accord. In fact, when he told me he was weighing up two offers, I told him which one I thought would be best for him and his career. It wasn’t the one that benefited me. It was the one that made sense for his life.

That exchange made me feel slightly nauseous. The absolution some owners want. The little confessional ritual that lets them feel blameless. I didn’t mean to. I wouldn’t have. As if hiring someone who’s already leaving is some kind of moral trespass.

I take real pride in building a good place to work, but that doesn’t mean we’re perfect. And it doesn’t mean we’ll be right for everyone, forever. Staff aren’t “yours”. They can’t be stolen. They make a choice, and sometimes the choice is simply to go.

I’ve watched kitchens haemorrhage talent while insisting nothing is wrong. I’ve watched the same operators complain about “this generation” while refusing to change anything about how power is used. I’ve also watched good people stay, for years, through chaos and thin margins, because the environment felt fair. Not easy, just fair.

The market has shifted, whether we like it or not. Kitchens talk now. Group chats exist. Instagram shows the inside of other rooms. People can see who laughs together after service and who limps to the pub in silence. The mystique has worn thin.

So when someone leaves, maybe the question isn’t who tempted them away. Maybe it’s what made them start imagining somewhere else in the first place. If your staff keep leaving, they’re not being stolen. They’re voting. And I’m not sure the industry is ready to read the ballot paper.

It’s remarkable how quickly the air can change without anyone raising their voice. Sometimes it’s irritation, sometimes embarrassment, as if they’ve broken an unspoken rule. Sometimes it’s the kind of indignation that comes from being told—however gently—that the way you navigate the world is now an inconvenience for everyone else. That’s where it catches, because whatever you think about cash, a restaurant is meant to make you feel welcomed, not administratively rejected. When the final note of your meal becomes about payment policy, the moment has soured.

Card-only didn’t become ubiquitous because restaurant owners woke up one morning and decided they fancied being difficult. It happened for the same reason most modernisation happens in hospitality. We were tired, the margins were thin, and the status quo came with too much risk and admin for the negligible upside.

Cash is labour. Not theoretical labour, but real work, at the tail end of double shifts, when everyone wants to go home. Floats, change orders, staff training. Checking the till. Rechecking the till. Just one more time, because what you’ve counted doesn’t match the report. The grim midnight ritual, trying to work out whether you’re short because someone made a mistake, nicked it, or the universe is hellbent on stealing twenty more minutes from what’s left of your evening.

Card-only deletes it. End the shift, tap one button, done. Less time being a bank manager, more time working on the things that matter to guests. Training, standards, and fixing problems with warmth and a touch of humanity.

Then there’s safety. Restaurants are full of people leaving in the darkness of night. Walking to their car if they’re lucky, but more likely catching a late bus, or a taxi if it’s really late. Keeping cash on site is an invitation to some of the people who lurk in shadows. It’s one more reason for those people to take an interest in you. It also creates internal risk, and I don’t say that sanctimoniously. Most people are honest, but there are also plenty who are stressed, skint, and surrounded by opportunity. Remove the opportunity and you can prevent a lot of very uncomfortable conversations.

Cash is a compliance headache too. Not because every cash-taking business is dodgy, but because cash creates grey areas. It’s easier to make mistakes, refunds become awkward, and it’s harder to spot patterns. Card payments are clean. They come with timestamps, totals, reversals, chargebacks, and service charge distribution. The machine isn’t moral, but it’s a lot more consistent than people. In a business with a lot of moving parts, consistency is a kind of mercy.

Banking is like a punitive sentence. Depositing cash takes time, and bizarrely, it costs money. Branches have disappeared, opening hours are unsympathetic to restaurants, coin handling is hellish. And what is it all for? A payment method used by a shrinking minority, requiring an entirely separate workflow maintained in parallel with the one almost everyone already uses.

That point is the one that tends to make the decision for us, particularly in a place where the average transaction value is north of £100. The infrastructure for taking cash doesn’t scale down. You need the same kit and the same procedures, whether you’re depositing £100 a week or £10,000. The costs are almost entirely fixed, which means if only one or two per cent of guests are paying in cash, the cost per transaction becomes absurd.

If we turn our attention to menus for a moment. Should a restaurant keep one wildly niche dish on that nobody orders, just in case one person comes in and wants it? All the while we’re prepping it, holding it, explaining it, and eventually binning it every week so nobody ever feels excluded?

In theory, hospitality wants to say yes. Of course we do, we want to be for everyone. In practice, operations punish indecision. Every extra option creates another process. Another opportunity for failure. Another thing to train and monitor. It’s not that we don’t care about the one person, it’s just that we also have to care for the other ninety-nine, as well as our staff. The reality is that you can’t carry infinite complexity without paying for it elsewhere.

That’s the case for restaurants, and it’s a strong one. But it’s not the whole story, because restaurants don’t exist in a vacuum. We sit on high streets, in neighbourhoods. “Just use a card” is perfectly reasonable, until you realise that not everyone can. Some people use cash because it helps them budget. The money feels real, and when it runs out, you can’t tap your way into an overdraft. There’s nothing irrational about that. There’s plenty of us who rely on our cards, but had moments when the contactless limit felt like the most dangerous thing in the building. Some people use cash because they have to. They’re paid in cash, in precarious work, dealing with documentation issues, or are simply trying to keep a roof over their head without inviting more complexity into their lives. For those people, being refused isn’t a mild inconvenience, it’s a signal that says, “this place isn’t for you”.

Some people raise the privacy point. Cash is anonymous; cards aren’t. Every coffee, lunch, and glass of wine becomes another breadcrumb in the long trail of data. Cash is also resilient. Wi-fi fails, and terminals go down. Banking systems have outages. Cash looks old-fashioned until the systems wobble, then it looks bloody appealing.

So yes, there is a real argument for accepting cash, and that argument is contextual. In a cafe with a low average spend and high volume. In a community where older guests make up the backbone of your trade. Or simply where the proposition is built on accessibility. In these places, cash acceptance isn’t just a payment method. It’s a part of the social contract. In higher spend, booking led restaurants, that context shifts. You have to maintain this whole extra operational lane for a tiny edge case, and that lane comes with risk, labour, and hassle.

And then we come to the part that people like to dance around. Some people insist on cash for perfectly legitimate reasons; budgeting, privacy, habit. And some people insist on cash because they don’t want transactions to leave a footprint. They might be dodging tax, hiding income, or breaking the law. Not every cash payer is doing that, obviously. But the overlap exists, and anyone who runs a business long enough will bump into it sooner or later.

Quite frankly, it’s not on restaurants to indulge that if they don’t want to. We already operate in a world where we carry burden from other people’s choices. Cancellations, no shows, staff shortages, late deliveries, rising bills. Adding the pressure to help someone live invisibly isn’t good hospitality, it’s enabling.

The best you can do is be transparent and decent. Let people know wherever you can, although that frequently fails. We have our payment policy on our website, our booking terms and conditions, and on the menus. Yet still, someone will still look me in the eye and tell me that they had no idea. People don’t read. They live in their own lives, and they’re hungry. That transparency, however, is good faith. It reduces surprise, which reduces humiliation, which reduces the chances of that last moment at the table turning sour. And, of course, you can leave a little room for being human. The graceful policy exception, not trumpeted, but pocketed for when someone is genuinely stuck. It’s not a loophole, or a soft reversal of the policy, but a simple recognition that running a restaurant is an exercise in judgement, and sometimes judgement means bending when the alternative is needless cruelty.

Cash hasn’t died because it’s silly. It’s died because it’s hard work. Card only wins because it’s safer, cleaner, faster, and easier. Most of the time, that matters. The uncomfortable part is accepting that convenience comes with a cost. It redraws the perimeter of who gets to participate without thinking too hard about it. It makes a restaurant simpler for the people inside, and without malice, it leaves someone standing outside the door with perfectly good money in their hand.

So here’s my position. Dogs should be allowed in some restaurants. Not all. And certainly not everywhere, all the time. At BANK, we’re dog-friendly. At Lapin, dogs are welcome on the terrace, but not inside the dining room. That distinction is deliberate.

BANK was designed as a neighbourhood restaurant — informal, fire-led, and spacious enough that, where it makes sense, dogs can be accommodated without disrupting the room. A place people come to often. Sometimes alone, sometimes fresh from a walk, sometimes with a dog. More importantly, BANK is part of its neighbourhood. Dogs already exist in that daily rhythm. In that context, a dog curled under a table doesn’t feel like an intrusion. It feels like part of the fabric. Another sign that this is a room stitched into real life, not hovering above it.

Lapin is different. Smaller. Tighter. More controlled — where safety, service flow, and simple collision avoidance start to matter. It’s already a squeeze — I’m too rotund to slip past the tables without turning sideways — and a dog spilling into the walkways would quickly become a recipe for disaster. There’s choreography to the service, pacing to the meal. In that environment, dogs inside would tilt the balance. Not because dogs are inherently disruptive, but because the room is calibrated finely enough that anything extra registers. So the terrace becomes the compromise. Fresh air. Space. A looser rhythm. Your dog can still come to lunch. Just not into the room itself.

The mistake is treating “dog-friendly” as a moral badge rather than a design decision.

A restaurant isn’t a public right. It’s a constructed experience. Floors, acoustics, menus, lighting, staffing, margins. Every choice carries cost and consequence. Allowing dogs isn’t about whether you like animals. It’s about whether the room, the service style, and the team can absorb them without compromising what the restaurant is trying to be.

The hygiene argument is usually the first grenade thrown. In practice, it’s rarely the real issue. Well-behaved dogs stay on the floor. Kitchens remain kitchens. Hands are washed regardless. The greater risk, honestly, is badly behaved humans with poor spatial awareness and a loud opinion about natural wine. But that’s harder to legislate against.

The allergy argument deserves more respect. No one should feel physically uncomfortable in a restaurant because of someone else’s choices. This is where clarity matters. If you allow dogs, say so. Clearly. Own it. Let people self-select. The worst outcome is surprise — for the guest with allergies, or for the team forced to manage tension mid-service.

Then there’s the unspoken truth: not all dogs should be in restaurants.

Some are anxious. Some are reactive. Some simply don’t want to be there. A dog trembling under a table isn’t charming; it’s a failure of judgement. Dog-friendly doesn’t mean dog-obligatory. It means welcome if appropriate. That requires owners to read the room — something humans already struggle with.

What I resist most is the idea that restaurants should be neutral, frictionless spaces, sanded down until no one could possibly object to anything. That way lies sterility. Personality drains out. You end up with rooms that are technically correct and emotionally vacant.

Restaurants, at their best, are expressions of values. They take a position, quietly. On pace. On noise. On formality. On how close you sit to strangers. On whether a dog might be asleep at the next table.

So no, dogs shouldn’t be allowed everywhere. They don’t belong in tightly packed dining rooms where precision matters, or in places built on stillness and focus. But banning them outright, on principle, misses something human. It forgets that hospitality is about how people actually live, not how we imagine they ought to behave.

The trick, as ever, is intention. Decide what your restaurant is. Design for it. Be honest about it. Then let the right people — and sometimes their dogs — find you.

I’m interested where people draw the line on this. If you’re a diner or an operator, I’d love to hear how you think about dogs in restaurants — the comments are open.

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