Will Britain's restaurants survive coronavirus?

For many chefs and restaurateurs the end of lockdown will not be the end of their problems. Here they describe how they’re coping

You need not be blessed with the visual imagination of a poet to look at these pictures of restaurants across London’s Soho with their windows boarded up and cast them as people, their eyes tightly shut. In the days following the government’s various announcements in mid-March leading to the current lockdown, chefs and restaurateurs had no choice but to lay off their staff, empty their kitchens of ingredients and put their businesses into enforced hibernation. It was a brutal but swift process. The question now being asked by the restaurant sector is, what happens when the pandemic ebbs away? What happens when the lockdown is declared over? Do the boards simply come down off the windows? Will all the UK’s restaurants, more than 25,000 of them, simply reopen their eyes?

There may be people who want to go out after the lockdown, but many have lost their jobs and will be absolutely skint