Five years ago, I broke the law. It was a week before the Christmas holidays and London was inflicted with Tier 4 restrictions, which made mixing households illegal. Those of us who worked in restaurants were apoplectic. We had chosen a profession built on bringing people together — and the government had chosen to forbid exactly that.
The Italians I worked with could not fly home and the Brits could not leave London. So after their final shift, they did the thing that made sense to them: they gathered around a table in the basement, ate, drank, and made Christmas at work feel like home. I stayed apart but smuggled home food that would otherwise rot: black truffles from Piemonte, bollito misto, quails, and agnolotti pasta. The state had banned communion, but my family made their own judgement about how to stay safe and stay human.
The pandemic was only one of the challenges I’ve had to deal with over 15 years in the hospitality industry. I’ve had newborns in cardiac arrest, gas explosions, attacks from drug-addicts, literal princesses, cellars full of faeces, a rumoured terrorist attack — and then, most heartbreaking of all, the closure of my beloved restaurant in Peckham last Christmas. It’s a fate that many small business owners have faced this year too: see the surprise closures of Claude Bosi at Bibendum, or Norman’s in Archway, or the hugely acclaimed Black Axe Mangal nose-to-tail Turkish in Islington, which will live on in some form but will no longer be a walk-in restaurant.
Why be a restaurateur? Some chefs get hooked on the Masterchef fantasy, dreaming of godhood under a toque blanche. For others, the long hours are fuelled by the promise that eventually the world will recognise their genius. It wasn’t like that for me: I was genuinely inspired by my experiences during the pandemic and surprised by how much I loved my customers and being at the heart of a community.
During the pandemic, I was working in a finance role in the basement of someone else’s Italian restaurant in Soho. I became both furlough administrator and bicycle courier, keeping it on life-support. I was drinking far too many double negronis, but it was also the most fulfilling time in my career so far. Some customers used the deliveries as a chance for conversation from a safe distance. Formerly lazy colleagues worked with purpose. It was this experience that inspired me to go it alone and build something personal that reflected my fifteen years of experience.
I figured there were enough gingham-clothed bistros and skin-contact wine bars around, and I could contribute something different: an affordable fusion restaurant that celebrated the collision of the two food cultures that had shaped me: British and Italian. I called it Café Britaly and opened it up in Spring 2024. My centre dish, a carbonara with cream and a fried egg on top, infuriated Italian social media (“che schifo”). But the critics didn’t mind: Jimi Famurewa called it a “rib-squeezing hug of pure comfort” and Marina O’Loughlin found it “entirely cheering” experience. It was often fully booked; the prosecco laced with Cornish limoncello was flowing; but I soon learned that I had little control over my restaurant. It was the Government that called the shots.
No one who set up a restaurant in the aftermath of the pandemic would ever have imagined that it would be easy. However, this was manageable compared to the Government intervention that really came for the hospitality sector — which was Rachel Reeves’s inaugural budget of 2024. If you’ve wondered why that restaurant you loved down your road shut down — despite great reviews, despite being full most of the time — that fateful budget probably has something to do with it.
Customers had already slowed their spending since Keir Starmer’s election that summer. Later data would confirm that this slump had started before the Budget — but the Budget was the final straw. It made staff even more expensive — I would have to fire a quarter of my workers — and forced me to reduce our running costs. Colleagues around the country were making similar choices: more than half of all job losses since the 2024 Budget have come from the hospitality sector.
But I knew that my restaurant couldn’t survive with so few staff. It was another two months before I could accept this. But, then, on 22 December last year, I did it. I made all of my staff redundant; I sold the lease; I announced the closure on TikTok, and my delivery was so bad that people thought it was a parody. One of the saddest days of my life turned into a viral video. Soon, the closures would accelerate elsewhere.
It wasn’t just Reeves who closed me down, though she played her part. It was 25 years of bad policy. The steady increase in the minimum wage has generally been applauded as a sign that the Government is doing something about inequality — but it has significant adverse effects, not least for the young, the inexperienced and the generally worse-off, who have become too expensive to hire. The logical thing to do would be to raise the price of dishes. But customers, squeezed themselves, are reluctant to pay more and so we restaurateurs usually find a way around the expense through discretionary service charges. The one cost that every restaurateur is trained to obsess over, staff costs, becomes harder and harder to control.
When I got my first job at a local pub back in 2008, I was only 17 years old. Some things were tough: like learning how to deal with drunk men four times my age or a colleague calling me an “assless little boy”. But still, it was a start. I was paid £4.60 an hour (the legal rate for 18-year-olds) which, this coming spring, will be up to £8. But that modest increase will soon be hiked up to the over-21s rate of £12.71 — an eye-watering 276% increase. Over the same period, inflation has been only 164%.
I would have liked that extra cash, but I certainly wouldn’t have deserved it: I lacked the experience. Each rise in the minimum wage is celebrated as an act of compassion — but everyone knows that when prices increase, demand reduces. This means business owners will stop taking risks on giving someone their first job.
Like many in hospitality, I’ve supplemented minimum wage with tips. But here, restaurants often skirt the law. First, as Michel Roux Jr once admitted, many establishments treated tips as revenue. And second, some restaurants (including one billionaire-owned chain I used to work for), use “fixed deductions” to allocate tips against the entire wage bill. Customers were wrong to think tips went in full to the team. Theresa May closed this loophole, but by then, restaurants were too reliant on it: it’s still rare for tips to reach the pockets of ordinary staff. Recently Gaucho’s troncmaster said this out loud, admitting that waiters would get a cut in their service charge payments, which would instead go to head office staff. After a public outcry they denied this. Still, I’ve heard of lots of other companies that still use this method.
It’s also increasingly difficult for employers to navigate our obligations to protect staff. You’ll probably have seen the signs saying “we do not tolerate abuse of our staff” (as if all customers are endemic harassers). The so-called “banter ban” (Clause 20 of the new Employment Rights Bill) says that employers must take “all reasonable steps” to protect staff with protected characteristics, like transgenderism or race. But how this plays out in practice is another matter. Once, a waiter asked me to remove customers for racism. It was because he’d heard them say the word “black” — though he didn’t know what they were discussing. My decision not to remove them was overruled by the senior manager, and they were denied food, made to pay for unfinished drinks, and kicked out.
What is the natural response to all these rising costs and obligations? To look for labour that is cheap, flexible, and willing to help a business stay afloat by bending the rules. That is why illegal working is rife in the industry. Restaurants know that enforcement is sporadic. Udaya, an Indian restaurant in East Ham, was found to have seven staff with no right to work, yet its local MP, Sir Steven Timms — now a Labour minister — intervened to say the breach was not deliberate. When well-connected places are let off, it becomes clear that the rules do not apply equally.
Some restaurants even pay staff in food, not money. Others, such as the notorious Royal China group, absorb repeated large fines as a cost of doing business. Yet enforcement is often so lax as to be meaningless. When immigration officers visited a restaurant I worked in during the 2010s, they checked only the kitchen porters, asked us to email the remaining documents, and left. We never heard from them again. The honest operator who tries to follow the rules carries the full weight of compliance. The dishonest one carries on.
Shabana Mahmood has promised tougher action, but her approach is to push more responsibility onto employers, tightening the checks we must carry out and increasing the penalties for getting it wrong. For large chains this is manageable. For small restaurants, it is another demand on time, money, and attention. And so the gap between big and small, or the honest and the scoundrels, only widens.
Faced with rising wages, tight margins, and heavy legal duties, many restaurants are now turning to the one option that avoids the entire regulatory structure: self-employment. The model is simple. If an individual working at your restaurant is not an employee but a contractor, you don’t have to worry about employment law, minimum wage, sick pay, holiday pay, tribunals, or the rest. You don’t even have to check the IDs of agency staff. Literally anyone can now work for a dodgy agency that will be phoenixed whenever it runs into trouble — and the restaurant is under no obligation to discover their right-to-work status.
This has created a two-tier system. On one side are workers who know their rights and are on the books. On the other side are the self-employed and agency staff who live outside the protections that all good liberals claim to cherish. Occasionally, the situation is spun as small-business owners having the freedom to set their own agenda. In reality, it’s just a big wheeze to control costs — the Deliverooification of employment.
And there is another option when labour becomes too costly, too complex, or too risky. Just get rid of the human element. Replace troublesome humans with quick service terminals, QR codes, and phone apps. Instead of going to your local sandwich shop and talking to a nice young person behind the counter, you can order a turkey sandwich on your screen at home. It’s efficient. It’s cheap. It’s the absolute antithesis of what just about everyone who works in hospitality cherishes about the industry. And of course, it means there will be fewer places run by people who really care about food, culture, customers, communities.
If the Government won’t make Britain a better place to start a restaurant, then fewer normal people will be able to set up restaurants. Only the big beasts with big pockets, the law breakers, and the established players will survive.
I still dream of a second Café Britaly. But this time, it would have to be smaller, serving coffees and sandwiches and staffed by only me. Recently, I looked at a tiny backstreet location and felt hopeful. Then the agent told me it would cost £60,000 a year, and that extinguished any hope. It will apparently become a dog hairdresser.
So, instead of chasing pennies and provocative pasta dishes, this year I will be feeding the homeless at Christmas. I have made an alcohol-free tiramisu, based on a recipe by Russell Norman, the man behind Polpo, a much-loved but troubled restaurateur. I remembered him as I folded the mascarpone into the eggs. The volunteers at the kitchen are a hodge-podge of young and old, confident cooks and hesitant ones, people who are loved and people carrying their own pain.
In hospitality I’ve seen people pushed to breaking point: friends have committed suicide, become addicted to booze or drugs, or else have lost everything. The guests are the same, only in different circumstances. Many of the people eating in soup kitchens this Christmas began their slide into homelessness when they fell out of work. Serving them tiramisú makes something very clear. Whether it is at a restaurant, a pub, a café, or a church hall, hospitality is when we come together to be comforted by others.
At Christmas, especially, that matters. Staff drag themselves to work on hangovers, volunteers ladle their carefully prepared soups, and strangers sit shoulder to shoulder popping crackers in jolly neighbourhood brasseries. The people who provide hospitality are becoming increasingly expensive, but they are also the entire point. One day we may wake up and wonder where all the humans went. For convenience, we will reach for our phone, and order another meal, to be delivered tepid and sweating inside a plastic box. The only human contact will be a mumbled confirmation code exchanged with a courier who barely speaks your language.
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