Fine dining? Now bill doubles to £200 each!

FINE dining may never have been exactly cheap – but now the final bill is enough to give restaurant customers indigestion.

Prices have more than doubled over the past six years thanks to the cost of living crisis, staff shortages and soaring food prices.

According to one guide, it means diners now face average bills of £200 per person – with one restaurant now charging £410 a head.

The damage suffered by the industry during the pandemic has also contributed to rocketing bills. While food inflation hit a record 11.6 per cent last month, restaurants have faced a higher cost to hire staff since Brexit and an overall worker shortage since the pandemic.

Restaurant guide Harden’s has raised the top price category of its London listings from £100 to £130 per head.

The 2023 edition includes 15 restaurants in the capital with a guide price of more than £200, compared with six in that bracket this year.

The general rate of increase was a record in the last decade and the highest since 2000.

Peter Harden, the guide’s editor, said: ‘We’ve gone very quickly from a time five years ago when charging over £100 a head was the outlier, to now, when for the very top restaurants £200 a head is becoming the norm. It feels like everything is speeding up. That’s because it is.’

The guide is listing 12 venues outside London that will charge more than £200 a head next year, compared with eight this year. This includes Britain’s most expensive restaurant Ynyshir in Ceredigion, Wales, which boasts a 32-course taster menu costing £410 per diner.

Harden’s Best UK Restaurants for 2023 describes the two Michelin star restaurant as a ‘major darling of the UK fooderati’ but says many of its reviewers now regard it as ‘ridiculously over-priced’. The cost per head in 2019 was £139.

But soaring prices can be seen across the board. At Kitchen Table in London, for example, the average cost per person is £330, up from £166 in 2019.

Mr Harden said: ‘If you go back to our first post-Brexit London edition in 2017, then there was just a single restaurant costing more than £150, now there are 37, and there are 154 in the guide above the £100 level.’

He added, with reference to Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant in Berkshire: ‘These days, it’s pretty hard to come out of the Fat Duck for less than £1,000 for two.’

‘Ridiculously over-priced’