Most restaurant critics will be familiar with the profession’s equivalent of a bat-signal. I do not mean this in the literal sense of a spot-lit logo in the night sky. No, I am talking about the digital message flares that those of us in the professional gluttony game soon grow accustomed to receiving: an unsolicited tip-off about an under-the-radar spot; a DM slide from a restaurant owner who (understandably) really just wants someone to give their business a chance; a surprise email identifying an overrated opening to avoid. The shape of the signals may not be predictable, but their arrival absolutely is.
A few weeks back, my friend Steven messaged me with one that fell into that final category, and concerned a newish place in the broad span of our south London neighbourhood. ‘Have you been?’ he asked, urgently, before going on to relay an evening of inept circa-30 quid mains, miserly £8 mash dollops, and calamitous puddings that had left him mystified and underwhelmed. ‘Nice buzzy atmosphere and good staff, but I left feeling rather ripped off,’ he added, finally. As it so happened, I hadn’t yet been to this place, but had heard quite wildly divergent things about its effectiveness. Yet, what struck me about Steven’s message was that it seemed to alight on a couple of issues that are particularly relevant as we mark the fifth anniversary of the pandemic.
First is the extreme sensitivity most diners feel to excessive price creep on restaurant menus – that intractable disconnect between what customers want to pay and what imperilled independent restaurateurs feel they can justifiably charge. Second, and perhaps most pervasive, is what strikes me as an especially fractious and adversarial relationship between restaurants and their customers. Morality debates around no-shows. Businesses secretly rating and even black-listing diners. Tensions around table time limits and impersonal bookings systems.
Five years on from the industry-shaking first lockdown – a period of trauma, but also of a Blitz spirit of long-range restaurant vouchers, supportive meal kit splurges and creative ways to help hospitality through an indefinite crisis – some of that collectivism and fellow feeling seems to have evaporated. What happened to it? And how can local restaurants be part of smoothing relations and bringing some of it back?
‘When even Greggs is taking a hit, you know something is up’
One very obvious reason for the current state of play is the vicious financial pinch being felt by many. The issues that trailed in the wake of the pandemic (the cost of living crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine affecting energy and food prices) are so familiar they’re practically recited scripture. Nonetheless, it bears repeating that the economic mood music within hospitality has, for some time, felt like a funereal dirge. Restaurant spending declined by 6.7 percent in 2023; this January saw hospitality insolvencies increase by 21 percent month-by-month. When even Greggs’ steak slice empire is taking a hit (sales at the bakery chain have slowed for the first time since the pandemic) then you know something is up.
As eating out has become a more infrequent treat, the emphasis on value has only grown more pronounced, with more scrutiny than ever over whether a restaurant meal was fully ‘worth it’. Half a decade after the solidarity, understanding and warm beam of appreciation engendered by Covid, independents find themselves needing to justify higher prices at the precise point the median diner is least willing to accept them.
There is a more abstract component to this shift as well. While the anarchic scramble of the post-Covid restaurant landscape could feel oddly thrilling, vivid and novel (here I have visions of an accidentally enormous mail order package of salt beef from the much-missed Monty’s Deli that was so large I could have almost started a franchise) it was also the sort of scarring experience you want to suppress. It does not seem an accident that somewhere like The Devonshire, arguably one of the post-pandemic era’s biggest hospitality success stories, feels like one massive, boisterous, defiantly undistanced riposte to all those long months of government-mandated confinement.
However, I think that the current skirmishes between owners and diners show that there has been something of an overcorrection. Or, at least, that a conscious shift from the intimate closeness of 2020 has given us a harried, survival mode dining era where both parties could benefit from showing each other a little more understanding. Yes, there will occasionally be justified grievances (like the ones expressed in my mate Steven’s message) after disappointing meals. But we punters should recognise the bleak realities and difficult decisions hospitality workers are faced with. Similarly, those running establishments should (as many chefs in the age of ‘radical transparency’ already are) communicate the rationale behind operational decisions and listen (within reason) when customers signal what they want.
‘A neighbourhood spot is the perfect place to recapture that lockdown-era closeness’
This is where local restaurants come in. Because, as I found recently, a long-established neighbourhood spot is the perfect place to witness this recapturing of that twinkly, lockdown-era closeness. Earlier this month, I went to Levan – a six-year-old, gently Francophile small plates spot in Peckham that, by complete fluke, happened to be my first meal out when restrictions first eased in 2020 – for a lunch that had a comforting magic to it. There, in a familiar sunlit room, were gooey Comté fries, tables full of midweek locals descending on large format pork chops, and signboards advertising a £19.50 Sunday offer for steak frites. It was a lucid, uncomplicated tonic; a reminder that certain forms of price-conscious hospitality are not just enduring but thriving in a continued atmosphere of polycrisis.
Consider this your own bat-signal of sorts, then. Your local restaurant needs you. And also, whether you realise it or not, I’d wager that you really, really need them too.
