We urgently need support to save our restaurants, bars and coffee shops in the face of mass cancellations
In the last six days, more than 650 people have cancelled their bookings at one of my restaurants. If that’s happening to us – busy restaurants with a chef who has something of a public profile – then imagine what’s happening to your local pub, coffee shop and the small independent restaurant around the corner. As soon as the government announced that people should work from home if they could, I began to lose sleep. For everyone in the hospitality business, it is looking like a bleak Christmas.
I spoke to a fellow chef yesterday who has a Michelin star, whose restaurant has lost 50% of its lunch trade for the next week and a half pretty much overnight. A two-Michelin-starred chef I know has had to close his restaurant between now and Christmas because a number of his staff have tested positive for Covid. This isn’t just about the top-end restaurants though, it’s throughout the entire industry – at the coffee shop in Marlow where I go, the owner told me that it was worryingly quiet. Many hospitality businesses take 20-25% of their yearly revenue in the December to January period. If up to a quarter of your revenue disappears, or is cut in half, that’s the difference between profit-making and huge loss-making, which in turn will become closure.
Tom Kerridge is the chef-patron of the Hand and Flowers in Marlow – the only pub in the UK to be awarded two Michelin stars
