Don’t moan about the cost of a restaurant meal – unless you don’t care about paying the chef and the waiter properly
How much are you willing to pay for someone else to cook your dinner, bring it to you in a nice room and then do the washing up? If recent news from the restaurant industry is anything to go by the answer is: nowhere near enough. Jamie Oliver is to close a dozen branches of his Italian chain, and flog his upmarket Barbecoa grills. Bang go a bunch of Stradas, bang go 20 Byrons, bang go 100 Prezzos. And alongside the chains there are myriad independents calling it a day. The ice buckets are overflowing with blood.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. Us modern Brits were meant to have become like the French and Italians; a cosmopolitan, gastronomically literate nation who understood the difference between polenta and couscous; for whom restaurant going had become an ingrained habit. Report after report said so. They talked about “long-term demographic and consumer trends”. And yet the economics tell another, more brutal story. We aren’t prepared to pay enough for it. We aren’t prepared to pay enough for the people cooking the food to be paid a decent wage for working reasonable hours.
Related: Next time you moan about the cost of a meal, think about who’s slaving in the kitchens | Jay Rayner
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