A toast to the pubs, restaurants and cafes that keep London alive
Many people harbour a secret – and not so secret – desire to run a restaurant, a pub, or a teashop. Many who make the leap find it rather more difficult than they’d expected; the margins are non-existent, the hours are often utterly miserable and thanks to the rise of anonymous reviews, social media and search engine optimisation you’re only ever one disgruntled customer away from a one-star rating on google.
But combine that with the actually difficult bits of the operation, like keeping your punters happy and paying the energy bill. It’s not surprising then that the dream of your perfect pub or restaurant starts to look more like a nightmare.
So hail the hospitality supremos we must. The 2024 reopening of Simpson’s in the Strand by the Savoy and Jeremy King is welcome news; as is the opening of the Wolseley in the City this week, by the very people that wrestled control of Corbin & King from the hands of King himself. Should there be rivalry we shall let it pass; for Londoners, it is only good news to have more, more, more.
What makes a City breathe is not its skyscrapers but its hostelries – the bars and restaurants and coffee shops in which memories are made. It’s what the militant remote workers never understood; maybe they just don’t like spontaneity.
The government is occasionally criticised for trying to put the hybrid working genie back in the bottle, but those people who chirp on social media fail to understand that hundreds of thousands of jobs, real jobs, are dependent on people congregating en masse.
Ask those people who’ve tried to start a restaurant in their beautiful Lake District idyll and seen their savings go up in smoke. London will remain a globally attractive city precisely because of its people, clamouring for a reservation at Simpson’s or the Wolseley, keen to impress a client over breakfast or a date in the evening. Government must support them; it must redouble efforts to keep our city centres thriving, with work to be done on business rates and reliefs.
In the meantime here’s to those who take the leap – and keep us fed and watered.