THE GREAT CHAIN

BritS have never eaten out as much as we do now. restaurants, once the preserve of special occasions, were often quite intimidating places. over the last generation, however, more and more chains have opened, catering to families wanting to eat out without blowing their pay packets. the average family now spends £45.10 a week on dining out, compared with £56.80 on food at home, according to the office for National Statistics.

But do these places offer good value? at least half the costs of running a restaurant are the rent, business rates and wages, all of which have increased over the past year. there is also Vat for the taxman. ultimately though, restaurants control the prices they charge — and the level of mark-up.

a recent Which? report found that the average mark-up on a bottle of wine in a uk restaurant was 167 per cent — and in one case was 300 per cent. the food is more difficult to calculate. We recruited Janet Brinkworth, a food economist who works on tV programmes including the BBC’s eat Well For less. She took away dishes, weighed the ingredients, calculated their raw weight and priced them as if they had been bought from Sainsbury’s.

though the ingredients might be higher quality than the supermarket options, that is likely to be balanced by the fact that restaurants can source ingredients cheaply from a wholesaler. Brinkworth believes this method is the fairest way of working out the true cost of the ingredients used.

With this, we calculated the mark-up for the food. this, of course, does not include the costs of cooking or serving the food nor the Vat, but nevertheless, it is a revealing exercise.

if you thought 300 per cent was a high mark-up for wine, you might well be surprised at the mark-ups being slapped on some pretty basic dishes.