Today we can start to “eat out to help out”. Whoopee! Of course, the place where you eat out has to be part of the scheme. And whether you can do it in Greater Manchester is questionable, given our current status. Apparently a “major incident” has now been declared, which I understand means extra checks in the readiness of emergency and public services to react to the escalating transmission of the virus.
None of this seems to have stopped people eating out and drinking out at the pub next door to us. So maybe you can still eat out provided you eat outdoors and with someone from your own household, although quite how anyone checks you are all from the same household seems a bit unclear, to me anyway. And I am pretty sure that people have been eating in at the pub next door.
This is all academic, as I have no plans to go and eat out anywhere just yet, apart from maybe a picnic in the park.
On the Food Programme on Radio 4 yesterday I heard a restaurant reviewer say: “No-one goes into the restaurant business to make money!” I think she meant that most people who open restaurants do so because they love food, love cooking, love the idea of making people enjoy good food but I bet that deep down they have a little glimmer of hope that they might be opening that little goldmine that makes the restaurateur rich. After all, every successful restaurant chain much have started somewhere small!
Jamie Oliver, who has made it big, and then saw his Jamie’s Italian restaurant chain run into difficulties, expressed his concern about the quality of food in restaurants in an interview with Zoe Williams:
“If you look at everyone doing well at the moment, they are basically prepping and shifting fairly low-quality food. So the thing I’m most worried about at the moment is the actual business of cooking and service is hugely under threat. Because it doesn’t pay the bills to care.”
That’s a bit damning about successful places! However, to some extent he echoes the sentiment expressed by the restaurant reviewer about the difficulty of making money running a restaurant or cafe. And the difficulty is even greater with Coronavirus around.
Some restaurant owners have spent lockdown time refurbishing and developing outdoor spaces but presumably you have to have to be doing well enough already to have the spare cash, tens of thousands of pounds in some cases, to spend on such work. And not everyone has that possibility. One cafe owner in Leeds had this to say:
“We are on our knees financially and I haven’t paid this quarter’s rent. Normally we would take at least £1,500 over a weekend but since 4 July we’ve only made £300 over a Saturday and Sunday.
It was fabulous to be able to furlough our 10 members of staff, many of whom are young, renting and need the money, but now it’s coming to an end I’m not sure staying open will be viable. I’m optimistic we’ll see some people visit but I think it will be regular customers rather than new ones.”
She has handed the day-to-day running of the cafe to her son but is looking at selling up. “I’ve used up all of the £10,000 local authority grant on rent and utilities. I used to be a lecturer and am living on my teacher’s pension. It’s such hard work running a business and I’m tired. I’m hoping by next month someone will buy it otherwise we’ll go bankrupt.”
Interestingly, it seems that a large number of restaurant owners have invested money in vans so that they can run their own delivery services or even set up shop on the street, having canvassed areas to see where they might be welcome and popular. This may explain “Tin Box Pizza” which pops up from time to time on a housing estate hear here. Even fish and chip shops have apparently begun delivery services in some villages.
I am reminded of being in France at the end of the 1960s and buying chips, but no fish or sausages, from a van in the square. The chips were usually served with mustard rather than malt vinegar. There is also Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown story “The Van” about a worker made redundant and setting up a fish a chip van.
In some cases they are hampered by the difficulty of getting a permit to set up shop in town centres but on the whole it looks like a viable alternative for some small businesses. Some enterprising folk are even planning on serving prosecco as well as coffee.
Getting back to Jamie Oliver, here’s an excerpt from Zoe Williams’ article:
“Oliver’s absolute passion, besides food itself, is fighting childhood obesity, an issue that has just landed at the top of the news agenda thanks to the government’s new obesity strategy, which will include banning junk food advertising and putting calorie counts on restaurant menus.
Oliver is delighted by the announcement, as he was by the former prime minister David Cameron’s work on the issue, and says it was only derailed by Brexit.
But his thinking, to my mind, doesn’t make sense – he is clear about the fact that the root cause of obesity is poverty: indeed, he shows me a graph he has had embossed in gold, and put in a gold frame, which shows that children from poor families are twice as likely to end up obese, that they – in his words – “live on the planet less time than their affluent friends”.
So I find it absurd for him to laud two prime ministers who have done so much to cause poverty in families, from benefit cuts to sanctions, from abandoning child-poverty targets to gleefully overseeing the introduction of a food-bank culture in this country, and congratulate them for taking obesity in childhood seriously.”
Good for Jamie Oliver for fighting obesity, but taking a graph about poverty, embossing it in gold and putting it in a gold frame, while possibly making an ironic statement about poverty, does seem a little over the top to me!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.
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