As of September, 1,409 restaurants had shut their doors in the UK in 2024. Many more announcements came in the last few months of the year. On New Year’s Eve, Hill and Szrok – the much-loved Broadway Market butcher – announced they’d be closing their subterranean restaurant after 11 years, citing the challenges of staffing. As 2025 began, we heard of the sad closure of Peckham’s Cafe Britaly after eight months, and the surprising shuttering of Locanda Locatelli after 23 years.
It’s safe to say it’s hard going for restaurants at the moment. A recent report by accounting firm Price Bailey found that over a fifth of UK restaurants were technically insolvent and expected to close within a matter of months. “Unlike most other sectors of the economy, insolvencies in the hospitality sector are still rising,” says Matt Howard, head of the insolvency and recovery team at Price Bailey. “There has been a sharp rise in restaurants entering insolvency over the last six months and the sector’s woes look set to continue.” He cites increases in the minimum wage and national insurance from the second quarter of 2025 as factors that will place further stress on businesses.
The stats are dire, particularly when you consider the impact the industry has on the economy. According to UK Hospitality, the industry is the third-largest employer in the country – responsible for over 3.5 million jobs and contributing over £93 billion to the economy each year. That’s a hell of a lot of jobs and incomes that are being consistently placed at risk as part of the precarious nature of the industry.
Rabbit Kielbasa
Garlic bread and cheese
Except, this is an industry that is no stranger to hustling. Restaurants have survived innumerable setbacks as financial times have gotten murkier – all of which were compounded over the Covid period. The pandemic was catastrophic for any restaurant or bar owner, and yet so many of them managed to survive. It speaks to the industry’s ability to adapt, be flexible and make things work even in the most exacting financial circumstances. It’s something we’re seeing again now as times get tough.
When, in October, London Fields small-plates-wine-bar Papi posted a photo of a menu, only available on Tuesdays for the upcoming month, that was all about celebrating lasagne, I sent it to my partner at lightning speed and had a table booked within ten minutes. We’re not huge Tuesday date night people, but I couldn’t resist the call of layers of ragu, carbohydrates and bechamel sauce – particularly when those carbohydrates were available for a limited time only. Papi is a funny little restaurant, scooted into the ground floor of one of the overpriced apartment blocks that have sprouted up like weeds across this formerly grungy corner of Hackney. It tempers its concrete-block home with a menu of big-flavour dishes and a wine list full of natural-adjacent heavy hitters.
All the way back in May 2024, the restaurant announced they would be opening on Tuesdays, but dedicating the day to a monthly changing concept – the first being pet nat and fried chicken, which while reading like a sign you might use to lure unsuspecting East Londoners into a trap, is also a lovely and, as it turns out, profitable combination. It was, unsurprisingly, a riotous success. They then moved onto French bistro Tuesdays, taco Tuesdays, lasagne Tuesdays and then, at the start of this year, curry Tuesdays.
It speaks to the industry’s ability to make things work even in exacting circumstances
The Tuesday that I visited in October, the restaurant was packed – a rarity on such a traditionally quiet evening for hospitality. It was the same again when I returned for curry night on a frigid early February evening. Co-owner Charlie Carr says the impact of the Tuesdays has been massive. “Midweek we’d usually be looking to do between 20 and 30 covers,” he tells me. “On Tuesdays, we can do upwards of 50 and even into the sixties.” He attributes the success to ‘curiosity’. “It’s funny, when you dangle a theme in front of someone, they get very excited,” says Carr. “You need to give someone a reason to go out and to come to you specifically. I think if you just let people know something is happening, it sticks in their mind.”
Not just a way to enliven a traditionally quiet night for restaurants, Papi Tuesdays has also had a marked impact on their accounts. “The really good thing about doing something on the first day that you open in the week is you get an immediate boost in the account,” Carr tells me. “Quite often what happens is you’ll build up to Friday or Saturday but, inevitably, there’s bills to pay from Monday. Previously, you’d look at the payables and say OK, I’ll be able to organise some of these by the end of the week, and then the rest will have to wait until next week and there’s this rolling-over effect. Whereas the good thing is if you can get a really busy Tuesday night, you can clear a lot of that, so you can move into the rest of the week a little more clearheaded.”
Papi isn’t the only eatery hoping to draw in customers on a quiet day. On Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia, July, which opened in April 2024, has brought in Apero Mondays, a homage to owner Solynka Dumas’ home country of France. “Apero Mondays came about in several ways,” Dumas tells me. “I guess the first one was the restrictions that we have with our site where – and this is very common in Central London, especially with big landlords – we had to be open every day of the week, it was part of our contract. We were trying to find a way to juggle this restriction, and also the wellbeing of our staff, making sure that they have enough time off. Also, since we only work with really seasonal and local produce from small producers spread across the UK, a lot of them are not able to deliver on Mondays. And then, finally, with Monday being quite a slow day in general, the dreaded day, we were like OK, how can we find a solution where we’re able to please the landlords, stay true to our vision, and still keep guests coming into the restaurant?’”
The answer, it turns out, lay in the convivial, casual nature of apero, or aperitivo as the Italians call it. Freeing up the kitchen, the event also allowed the restaurant to host pop-ups, events and chef residencies. “We can just basically use it as a time to have the various producers come, talk about wine, have some of our suppliers visit, or a special event,” Dumas says. “We’ve had some artists’ dinners too, where they come and talk about their work. It’s a good springboard to be creative and do things that expand beyond just our interest in food and wine.” Interestingly, Dumas says while Apero Mondays bring in a different, more international crowd, it’s the days they host events when she notices things are rammed – perhaps playing into what Carr says about events, and their scarcity, enticing people to come out on days they usually wouldn’t.
Over in Bermondsey, two-Michelin-starred Trivet, which opened was opened in 2019 by The Fat Duck alumni Jonny Lake and Isa Bal, throws open its doors on Mondays for their ‘La Bombe’ wine bar, with an informal (albeit extremely impressive), accessibly priced snack menu and an exclusive menu of wines by the glass from the restaurant’s 400-strong bottle list. “It makes what we do a bit more accessible in a different setting, with an alternative offering” says co-founder Isa Bal. “It helps to create new ideas and dishes as well.”
One of the most surprising closure announcements of 2024 was Jackson Boxer announcing he was closing his lauded Notting Hill restaurant Orasay, and opening a different concept, Dove, in its place a week later. Orasay opened in 2019 with the intention of cooking a fish-focused menu with ingredients sourced from dayboats around the UK. It gained legions of fans for Boxer’s big-flavour cooking that still, at its heart, prioritises the magic of incredible produce. It cut that rare balance of somehow managing to be a neighbourhood joint and simultaneously a destination restaurant worth travelling across town for. In the closure announcement, Boxer wrote “Orasay was never a very lucrative business. We specialised in working with a fragile and elusive product with a minuscule shelf life that needs a great deal of labour to prepare, and though we’re busier than we’ve ever been in terms of guests through the door, those guests have considerably less freedom to spend than perhaps they once did, and as such, being unable to raise prices, and being unwilling to work with a cheaper and inferior product, we have decided to imagine a bold new future for ourselves in quite another direction.”
If you can get a busy Tuesday night you can move into the rest of the week clearheaded
Expanding on the point of the business’s profitability, Boxer said: “Orasay emerged from my desire to play with beautiful and rarefied wild fish and shellfish from dayboats around the UK, and deliver considered and interesting plates in a highly relaxed and informal manner - all of the care and attention to detail of traditional fine-dining restaurants, but a much more approachable style of service, and, crucially, pricing.” He adds that the size of the restaurant and the expensive nature of the product they worked with directly impacted the ability to turn a profit. In many ways, as well, the special nature of the restaurant and its subsequent international notoriety meant it was a victim of its own success.
“What was incredible to me was how much of a global following it was able to accrue, being this small neighbourhood restaurant in West London, which never even entered my thinking as an ambition from the outset,” Boxer tells me. “This was fabulous for bringing us guests from all over the world, and instilling enormous pride and purpose in my team. It also did turn what was supposed to be a very casual experience into a more rarefied and reverent one, which in turn meant it never really felt like somewhere you could spontaneously drop into for a quick meal.” Boxer intends for Dove to reclaim that sense of spontaneity – although early glowing reviews imply it’s set to hit similar dizzying levels of popularity. The menu is full of heavy hitters – deep fried taleggio and Wiltshire truffle lasagne, fried pizzette with burrata and ham, and a gorgonzola burger that already has people going mental, to name a few – and in the press release, was described by Boxer as “not reinventing the wheel, but re-inventing the restaurant for today’s economy.”
Deep fried taleggio and Wiltshire truffle lasagne
The famous Dove burger
Boxer believes that the economy is pushing restaurants from “places of discovery, places which we desire to visit as guests in order to accrue knowledge, to being places which primarily exist to reinforce or validate the familiar.” He cites financial risk as the primary driver of this – for a guest to take a punt on a new bottle of wine five years ago it may have set them back £30, no huge loss if they didn’t like the wine. Now, that same bottle will cost them £50 and, as Boxer says, “that £50 probably represents a much greater proportion of your monthly discretionary spending due to the huge increase in rent and other living costs borne by the majority of Londoners.” Thus, the consumer is less willing to take a risk on something, and is instead prioritising the safe and the familiar – places where they know their money will give them something they’ll enjoy. “I think a picture emerges of why the whole fundamental purpose of Orasay, as a celebration of the rare and obscure – backed up by a blockbusting fried fish bun or two, I have no problem admitting – felt like a beautiful dream no longer equipped to survive in the harsh reality of 2025.”
If things were looking bad at the end of last year, they’re only set to get worse in Q2 of 2025 with the implementation of a series of new policies by the government. “This April, the sector is facing a bill of £3.4bn in higher National Insurance Contributions (NICs), changes to business rates, and other cost increases,” Kate Nicholls, Chief Executive of UKHospitality tells me. “This will no doubt force more pubs, bars and restaurants to close and those that remain will be forced to look at abandoning investment plans, freezing recruitment, cutting hours or increasing prices in order to survive.”
Nicholls calls for a delay to the NIC changes, alongside a clear growth plan for the industry in order to help lift the restaurant industry up, rather than cut it down. “As one of the largest employers in the country, backing hospitality is an investment in vibrant towns, cities and communities,” she adds. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. While things might be in dire straits right now, this is an industry that is no stranger to reinventing the wheel in order to keep things moving. Whether it’s lasagne nights in London Fields, the French love for apero or as simple as a plate of deep-fried lasagne, restaurants will stop at nothing to keep the doors open – and it’s our job to keep walking through them.
