FTSE 100 ▲ 8,142.55 +0.42% GBP/USD 1.2731 BRENT $84.12 BTC £52,901 BoE base rate 4.75% London 12° Overcast Sterling steady ahead of CPI print FTSE 100 ▲ 8,142.55 +0.42% GBP/USD 1.2731 BRENT $84.12 BTC £52,901 BoE base rate 4.75% London 12° Overcast Sterling steady ahead of CPI print
LIFE&STYLEFood★ Premium

Britain's restaurants are quietly reinventing themselves

Shorter menus, longer relationships with suppliers, and an industry-wide rethink of what hospitality owes its staff.

NC
Naomi Carr
Today, 10:30 · 6 min read
Britain's restaurants are quietly reinventing themselves

The most interesting restaurants opening in Britain this year are not the ones grabbing the headlines. They are quieter, smaller, often outside London, and almost universally built around the same set of choices.

Menus are shorter. Suppliers are named, sometimes obsessively. Opening hours are narrower, and increasingly framed around what the staff can actually sustain rather than what the rent demands.

Subscriber-only article

Keep reading Britain's restaurants are quietly reinventing themselves.

You've read 2 of 5 paragraphs. Unlock the rest of this comment piece — plus every Opinion article — from £1 for your first month.

  • Unlimited access to every Premium article
  • The Daily Briefing newsletter, 6am every weekday
  • Cancel any time. No ads, ever.

Already a subscriber? Sign in to continue reading.

Reader comments

7 comments

On: Britain's restaurants are quietly reinventing themselves

Join the discussion

Comments are moderated. Be civil.

  • JA
    Jenny AdamsonNewcastle · Yesterday

    Read this twice. First time I was furious. Second time I started to see the point. Hate when that happens.

  • EC
    Emily CarterOxford · 34 min ago

    Forwarded to my MP. Not that it'll do any good but at least I'll have tried.

  • TH
    Tom HarringtonLeeds · 8 hrs ago

    What nobody is talking about is who actually benefits from all this. Follow the money and the picture becomes very different.

  • BW
    Ben WhitfieldLondon · Yesterday

    Good piece but the comments section under it is going to be a warzone within the hour. Grab the popcorn.

  • HR
    Hannah ReidEdinburgh · 1 hr ago

    Sharing this with my book club tonight. We've been arguing about exactly this for two months.

  • LC
    Linda ColeBristol · 12 min ago

    Lived through the 80s, the 90s, 2008 and Covid. Every generation thinks their crisis is the worst. It rarely is. Calm down everyone.

  • FS
    Fiona StewartAberdeen · 2 hrs ago

    Could we have a follow-up piece with actual solutions rather than just describing the problem? Getting tired of diagnosis without prescription.

Related

Keep reading.