Restaurants close as diners lose appetite for eating out
Jamie Oliver is the highest profile chef to be hit by the downturn in eating out.
Oliver, worth £150 million, said his restaurant business ran out of cash in September last year when he got a call saying he had just two hours to put money in to avert collapse.
He put in £12.7m, supplemented by bank loans and subsidies but he has since shut 12 of the chain’s 37 restaurants and made about 600 staff redundant in an attempt to save the rest of the operation. Oliver said: “We had simply run out of cash.
“And we hadn’t expected it. That is just not normal, in any business. You have quarterly meetings. You do board meetings. People supposed to manage that stuff should manage that stuff.” Across the UK, the number of restaurants has fallen for the first time in eight years.
Insolvency Service figures for Scotland showed 76 failures in the first six months of this year, three more than for the whole of 2017. Restaurants accounted for 8.6% of all corporate failures, compared to just 3% a decade previously.
With 234 Scottish restaurants going bust in the past three years, it equated to one eatery entering insolvency every five days.
As many simply close and don’t bother going through an insolvency process, it’s thought the numbers in trouble will be much greater. Award-winning chef Mark Greenaway recently announced the closure of his fine dining Edinburgh restaurant while saying he would be opening another venture without “tablecloths or waiters in waistcoats and ties”. Some independent operators in the capital have blamed the expansion of chain restaurants. David Ramsden, of the Dogs restaurant in the city centre, was one of those hitting out, saying his business had been “decimated”. It’s thought many restaurants are also struggling with margins as they are forced into taking discount vouchers to fill tables.