The price of a meal at the UK’s best restaurants has more than doubled since Brexit from £100 a head to more than £200, according to two new guide books.
Peter Harden, the editor of his eponymous restaurant guides, said: “We’ve gone very quickly from a time five years ago when charging over £100 a head was the outlier, to now, when for the very top restaurants £200 pounds a head is becoming the norm.”
For the first time Harden’s London Restaurant Guide has raised its top price threshold to £130 a head to reflect record menu price rises. The 2023 edition includes 15 restaurants in the capital with a guide price of more than £200 a head, compared with six in that bracket this year.
And Harden’s Best UK Restaurants for 2023, published next month, will list 12 venues outside London charging more than £200 a head, compared with eight this year. They include Britain’s most expensive restaurant Ynyshir Hall in Ceredigion, Wales where the 32 course taster menu costs £410 a head.
It describes the restaurant, which has two Michelin stars, as a “major darling of the UK fooderati”, but it notes that many of its reviewers now regard it as “ridiculously overpriced”.
Harden said: “If you go back to our first post-Brexit London edition in 2017, then there was just a single restaurant costing more than £150, now there are 37, and there are 154 in the guide above the £100 level.”
He added: “This phenomenon is not restricted to London. The most expensive formula price in our UK guide this year is £430, for Ynyshir in Wales.” He added, with reference to Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant in Berkshire: “These days, it’s pretty hard to come out of the Fat Duck for less than £1,000 for two.”
One of Harden’s reporters described the Fat Duck as “unbelievably overpriced … we ate at a number of Michelin one stars at the same time, which we enjoyed far more, and you could have had almost four meals at those restaurants for the price of just one at the Fat Duck”.
Harden said some UK restaurants were now charging “staggering amounts that would have been inconceivable in the UK only a few years ago”.
Harden said Brexit was posing an existential threat to the restaurant business, partly because of rising food prices, but mainly because of the extra cost of hiring staff.
He said: “Brexit has been absolutely disastrous for the trade. We launched our guide 32 years ago before the Maastricht treaty. The ability to recruit Europeans, was one of the key drivers of the restaurant revolution that took place in the UK over the last 25 years or so. [At] many of the top restaurants … 80% plus of their staff would have been European.
“Britain has woken up to good quality food. Now the question is, how many of us can afford it, and is there anyone to serve it?”
Harden said the impact of Brexit has been “most dramatic at top restaurants” with many opting to charge diners for pre-paid fixed prices.
He explained: “The tasting menu has become much more prevalent, to help restaurants work out their margins. The answer for many is just to feed fewer people and to open less.”
“The a la carte menu has really died a bit of a death at top restaurants. It’s becoming impossible to go in and have a taste of highlife by getting a main course and a glass of wine. Now you have to spend four hours eating 32 courses and come out absolutely stuffed to the gills. The restaurants get much more certainty that way.”
The Fat Duck has been approached for comment.
Prices per head at Harden’s top London restaurants for 2023
Araki £380
Kitchen Table £330
Endo at Rotunda £285
Roketsu £285
Story £272
Maru £242
Ledbury £236
Ikoyi £231
Core £226
Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester £224
Sketch (Lecture Room) £223
Da Terra £223
Restaurant Gordon Ramsay £210
The Frog £208
Clove Club £206
Prices per head at Harden’s best UK restaurants 2023
Ynyshir Hall, Eglwys Fach £410
Fat Duck, Bray £353
Midsummer House, Cambridge £321
L’Enclume, Cartmel £296
Raby Hunt, Summerhouse £277
Moor Hall, Aughton £273
Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, Great Milton £269
Waterside Inn, Bray £226
Whatley Manor, Easton Grey £217
Outlaw’s New Road, Port Isaac £215
Mana, Manchester £203
Lympstone Manor, Lympstone £201
