Your table is ready: the return of the restaurant

Chefs share their stories as they prepare to open for the first time in months. Keith Miller hopes you’re hungry…

Back in the spring, soon after lockdown was imposed, restaurant reviewers around the country began to post funny short videos on their social media accounts. These would typically depict some innocent creature in a state of ecstatic liberation – little Agnes from Despicable Me doing the loco-motion, say, or Willy the orca jumping over Jason James Richter’s head. Each one made clear that the author of the post was really looking forward to going out to restaurants again.

And now, more than three months later, our chance has come. Today’s the day that restaurants in England are permitted to open again. As for what they will look and feel like – well, we’re about to find out. Some of the distancing hardware looks quite fun (I quite fancy whisking my support bubble off to a geodesic dome for four at some point).

Restaurateurs had to reshuffle their tables around last week, when the two-metre distancing rule was relaxed to “one metre plus”: throughout lockdown, detailed, coherent guidance from the Government has been frustratingly slow to materialise. Many uncertainties persist.

With two-metre spacing in place, the average restaurant’s turnover was predicted to reach only a third of pre-Covid-19 levels; at one metre it’s likely to be more like 70 per cent. But in a highly marginal industry, even this will have an impact. Then again, the public are clearly divided on the wisdom of the latest guidance, so they may favour restaurants that are in a position to offer a more spaced-out dining experience.

In many cases, the very viability of businesses is clearly still under threat. Restaurateurs Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, partners in the industry for nearly 40 years, whose uber-theatrical, ultra-metropolitan Eurobrasseries were the first to come to mind when I imagined what sort of restaurant I’d like to return to when I could, equivocated about when, or if, to reopen their gilded palaces of sin, before deciding last week that “if people are willing to go to restaurants then we should be open”. Not everyone has the luxury of that choice: several high-profile closures have been announced, and UKHospitality reports that the industry is braced for more than 300,000 redundancies.

During lockdown, many chefs have rethought their businesses and reinvented their role in their communities, pivoting to take-away, delivering meals on wheels and essentials to isolated customers, cooking for key workers. Such flexibility ought by rights to help them roll with the punches to come.

Others have taken to the barricades: celebrating under-represented food cultures, campaigning for structural reform in an industry that’s long been blighted by overwork and low pay. Chef Pamela Brunton has highlighted the way a restaurant like hers – Inver, on the banks of Loch Fyne in Argyll – works with local producers and suppliers to sustain ties across a remote rural community, and suggested that the destructive tendencies of the old profit-driven model might be mitigated in future by a mixture of rent controls and training subsidies for craft skills. “Restaurants have the utensils for rebuilding a food culture that serves us all,” she wrote in the newsletter Vittles, urging us to see a menu as the embodiment of a set of values, not just a list of prices.

Speaking of menus, sharing plates may be off for some time yet. Other 2010s clichés including food served on building materials, long spiels from servers about every single dish and even longer queues may likewise go the way of the dodo: even if queuing can be quite congenial, it’s unlikely a socially distant line stretching from Soho to Heathrow would have the same buzz. Expect, instead, to see Perspex screens, sanitising stations and single-use menus.

There’s a famous line in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard: “If we want everything to stay as it is, everything needs to change.” So it is likely to be with restaurants, at least as long as distancing measures are in place. Whether you hanker after excellent, inventive cooking or the buzz of being out on the town with your friends, you’re unlikely to get quite what you hoped for today. If you’re anticipating more fairness, transparency and accountability in the trade, then I earnestly hope you’re right: time will tell.

But if we want our restaurants to survive, to become again what they once were to us, we’d best start by booking a table and voting, or (if you prefer) loco-moting, with our feet.

The interior of The Grand Duchess, which will celebrate its reopening with a two-day socially distanced party