It’s a mid-week evening in Mayfair, outside one of London’s hottest new restaurant openings. A man emerges from the rammed dining room, shakes his head ruefully and mutters to a friend: “I can’t believe I’ve just dropped two-and-a-half thousand pounds on wine on a Wednesday night.” For all the undoubted smorgasbord of challenges facing the capital’s beleaguered hospitality sector — ranging from soaring food inflation and construction costs to Rachel Reeves’s devastating National Insurance raid on employers — one fact remains. There is still money sloshing around London.
And much of it is finding its way into the dining rooms of Mayfair, Soho and Covent Garden. Indeed, after a tough five years — the pandemic era of lockdowns, followed by the cost-of-living crisis — there are tentative signs that something of a fine dining restaurant opening boom may even be under way.
