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When the closure of Salon restaurant was announced on Instagram in early June 2022, London diners were shocked.
Having operated for a decade, it was one of the shining lights of Brixton Village, the warren of restaurant-packed arcade space that has been such a draw for the city’s freewheeling eaters, as well as a stick with which to beat the gentrifiers.
Salon stood out as a reasonably priced, accessible restaurant with fancier aspirations amongst the slew of fast-casual options. Dinner there was, frankly, a bit of a steal (£52 at the time of closing for a tasting menu that would easily cost you 50% more elsewhere in London for the same quality).
“Ultimately, the financial challenges of the industry got the better of it,” says chef and co-owner Nicholas Balfe, whose restaurant group also has two sites in nearby Peckham (Larry’s and Levan) and the newish Holm in Petherton, Somerset.
Having weathered the pandemic fairly successfully with a popular takeaway business, a combination of Covid-related factors decimated Salon’s trade last winter (being under cover, Brixton Village has always been a seasonal location) and with the weight of significant financial pressures affecting restaurants everywhere, the tough decision was taken to consolidate, with Salon as the sacrificial lamb.
“Our staff costs are higher than they've ever been, and necessarily because people need more money to live,” says Balfe. “The cost of ingredients is exponentially higher - crucially, the cost of sundries. All of our suppliers are getting squeezed because of things like fuel costs. I was just chatting to a chef who turned down a job because it was too far from home and the cost of getting from where he lived to work would cancel out the increase in salary and it just wasn't worth it. And I think that's the mindset that people have now.”
Nicholas Balfe at Salon before its closure. Photo by Tim Mitchell
A recent report suggests only one in three hospitality businesses in the UK are currently profitable, with rising energy, goods and labour costs being the three most significant factors. Chuck in a cost-of-living crisis, with inflation predicted to peak at 11% by the autumn, and it’s no surprise that restaurateurs are closing their more financially wobbly locations. Casamia in Bristol, which as recently as 2018 was named as the best restaurant in the UK by Square Meal, will shutter its doors this summer, with chef-patron Peter Sanchez-Iglesias describing the business as “financially unviable” due to rising costs.
At one of the UK’s best restaurants, the three-Michelin-starred L’Enclume in Cumbria, they’re tackling rising costs by increasing prices. Chef-patron Simon Rogan’s restaurant now offers one tasting menu at £250, a close to 30% price increase. They’ve also got rid of a cheaper lunch menu.
According to Sam Ward, managing director of the umbrella Simon Rogan restaurant group, the price hike was unavoidable, telling The Times: “Every single thing that we spend money on has gone up in price. Labour is a big one. We are committed to [paying] people to give them a decent standard of living. We will not have the price of our menus subsidised by our team making any sort of sacrifice.”
For some restaurants, however, raising prices is simply not viable. For Balfe, it wouldn’t have worked at Salon, given its location. “You can only charge so much for a meal if you're in a slightly rustic Brixton market location. If you saw a tasting menu for 100 quid a head, you'd think, ‘what the hell is this?'"
Over at Michelin-starred Cornerstone in Hackney, chef Tom Brown has been faced with a similar dilemma. “I’m really conscious of trying not to alienate people, as we’re going through the same thing and we’re all experiencing the cost-of-living crisis together. I would prefer to rework the menu rather than raise menu prices extortionately,” he says.
For Brown, an immediate action has been to swap out some of the more expensive ingredients on the menu at his fish-focused restaurant. That means, currently, losing scallops, cod, John Dory, and even mackerel, and adding in mussels, and chalk stream trout instead of salmon in Cornerstone’s signature fish pastrami.
“At the end of the day, fishermen have to charge what they have to charge and as a group of people that are regularly undervalued and underpaid, and are doing dangerous work each day to bring us the beautiful produce we use in the restaurant, I won’t argue with them,” he says.
Of course, it’s not just the UK where this is happening. It’s been reported that over at Parachute restaurant in Chicago for example, the owners are even taking their signature dish off the menu because it no longer makes financial sense – a huge deal for any restaurant.
One of the hopefully lasting consequences of the pandemic is that there is a deeper bond between restaurants and their customers, and a greater understanding among diners of what it really costs to run a restaurant, both financially and emotionally. But Brown isn’t expecting sympathy.
“I really don’t think it’s the diners’ responsibility to be understanding, at the end of the day we’re not a charity and we’re still charging them money to eat our food. We might adapt our menus, swap some ingredients, but we need to still be providing the best we can serving the same standard of dishes. They are there to order the food, eat it, get the bill and make the decision as to whether it’s worth the money or not.”
For Balfe, diners still need to be better educated about what it actually costs to get good food onto the plate.
“Across the board, restaurants are putting their prices up, and I think guests are getting their heads around that, but I still think there's a little bit of work to be done to educate guests on why a meal costs what it costs. Yes, you can go to a supermarket and get a steak for a fiver. But gram for gram that same cut of meat, in our case certainly from an independent farmer who's hopefully using good farming husbandry principles, could cost you 30, 35, 40 quid. And the reasoning for that is ultimately because of fixed costs and overheads.”
Tom Brown. Photo by @lateef.photography
With seemingly no end in sight to the various economic pressures we’re all facing - not just those who run restaurants - there are a few things that we can say with almost certainty: we will lose more restaurants, fine dining will become even more exclusive and we will all have less money in our pockets.
There also seems to be a lack of understanding on behalf of policy makers about what it costs to get good food onto the plate, and where the blame lies for the cost-of-living crisis. A new campaign by the UK government urging business to slash prices has been widely criticised in the hospitality sector.
“It’s quite scary, to be honest. It looks like we’re on the path to recession and it’s pretty terrifying,” says Brown. “I hope the government will see sense and will keep tabs on the big companies making massive profits. It is a worrying time in a restaurant, especially one that is usually so busy and is now slightly quieter.”
Balfe senses that the industry may need to pool together to get through this. Indeed it’s something we’re already seeing, with the likes of chefs Tommy Banks and Paul Ainsworth launching a staff-swap initiative between their UK restaurants. And of course an upshot could also be restaurants becoming more self-sufficient and sustainable. “Investing now in the infrastructure for things like growing their own produce or reducing their supply chains or repurposing food waste into biofuels,” says Balfe.
“I can see lots of businesses perhaps with more of a collective approach to manage the spiralling costs,” he says. “And I wonder if there might be some kind of collective approach to the staffing situation because I don't see that changing drastically in the near future. All are things we're looking at across our group.”
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