Closing Down An Industry
What will we do when there's nowhere left?
It’s the middle of January 2023 and what I thought might happen is happening—hospitality businesses are counting up their Christmas and New Year takings, falling short of their targets, and closing up shop. This week I’ve seen a few surprising closures locally and more further afield—perhaps most shocking to me, Yakumama in Todmorden, a place that seemed to be thriving in the atmosphere of Tod’s excellent local bar and food culture. This morning I saw that iconic shop Oklahoma—once a café that showed me Manchester maybe wasn’t quite as bleak as I thought it was when I first moved there—is closing too, to focus on its online offering. A Burnley café that opened during lockdown and was loved by its regulars is closing. That one came up on my newsfeed. Breweries are closing too, and restaurants. This week is The Moorcock’s final week of trading. My favourite restaurant, and one of the most creative, inspirational, down-to-earth and welcoming places I’ve ever eaten, will be closing the door of its pub on the hill and its people will move on to pastures new. I am truly gutted.
It’s not just the indies who can’t cope. Chains of casual dining restaurants, funded mostly by investors with zero interest in food and ballooning in visibility (but curiously, never with that much popularity) around the 2010s, are flailing in the riptide. Byron Burger, perhaps best known for detaining workers they’d already trained and hired and staging an immigration raid, is closing locations all over the country. Same for Zizzis, ASK Italian, Cafe Rouge and Las Iguanas. These are not businesses set up by well-meaning and naïve folk with passion projects. They are huge, multi-million-pound companies, collapsing all around us.
For the longest time, we’ve looked at the struggling hospitality sector as a frivolous extra—part of British industry in only as much as those with real jobs use the businesses within it to wind down after a hard day’s graft. But I’ve been wondering, as the owner of a struggling hospitality business, what’s going to happen to the hundreds of thousands of people employed within the industry? How is the economy going to cope when workers cannot access the country’s largest unofficial financial safety net because it no longer exists? And while we watch our favourite places close around us, how will we encourage the good people who make our bars, pubs and restaurants what they are not to retrain out of the hospo world for good?
I am way past worrying about whether my business will survive the year now. I’m worried about the industry at large.
Other Stuff
Being filmed without realising it while I’m out having a good time is not something I wanted to start being anxious about, but thanks to the Internet, now I am. Stop filming people without their consent. And while you’re at it, stop being so fucking boring.
The always well-researched Steve Dunkley on brewery closures and the state of the industry
Rachel Signer’s “liquid diary” of a family holiday in Europe. A wonderfully evocative and honest piece I was honoured to edit.
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People sharing a Burning Sky at Corto — Photo by James Pinder