Finding it increasingly difficult to justify eating out at pubs etc

i think it’s sandwiches and cake are more overpriced if anything. Thankfully we have a lovely pub nearby (who don’t serve food) with a chip shop next door and we buy food to take into the pub - £15 for a large feeds us both and it’s £4.20 a pint of beer

£10 plus for a jacket potato with beans and cheese!
£4 for an average sized slice of Victoria sandwich
People won’t put up with it. I can see pub and garden centres closing

But it isn't just a teabag and water is it?
It's a tea bag, water, electricity, cutlery and crockery, furniture, heating, decor, property and equipment cleaning and maintenance, insurance, accountancy costs, staff wages, NI contributions, pension contributions, mortgage/rent, business rates and probably plenty of other business costs that I have no idea about.

Never been big on eating out since we came back to live in the UK after a decade abroad where prices were keen and food quality high. Disappointed a number of times here so rarely bother. I spend quite a bit on food and know that I can have a higher quality meal at home for a fraction of the price of the local pubs and restaurants.

However, those of us on this thread are clearly in the minority as coffee shops, pubs and restaurants are the only thing opening up and doing a roaring trade on the High Street other than Turkish Barbers! We recently came back from Krakow, hundreds of places to eat and drink and all of them busy, the difference there was the quality was high and the prices reasonable.

Happy to use my local Wetherspoons!
Good choice of food, veggie options, very reasonable price, unlimited tea/coffee, good service, clean, spotless toilets, nice carpets.
I used to be snobby about them, but was persuaded by my daughter when she was a student to try them; I now go once/twice a week and have never been disappointed.

Our local pub/restaurant is on the marina. Locals support them all year round. Boat owners come down to work on their boats popping in for a coffee and sometimes lunch. Just in time for Easter they slapped £2 on absolutely everything, food, drinks. Locals stopped going in protest. Even visitors baulked at the prices. It's been dead this whit week. The food isn't good to start with. The manager has popped outside stopping the locals asking why they've not been in . Well the menu hadn't changed in five years and now a coffee and sandwich is £4 more. From £19 to £23 .

What really gets me is £3.75 for a herbal tea . Teabag and water , so expensive even yes for taking up a space but no you don’t have waiting staff .

The cheekiest charge are the sides. Roast dinner £20 then it's £3 for each vegetable. So potatoes, carrots, peas adds another £9.

@Maverickess

Tbh a lot of what's being said is basically people feel entitled to a decent service delivered by other people, but don't think it's worth paying a decent price for.

The real problem is the venture capitalists and other "money man" taking far too high a profit, so over-charging their customers AND under-paying their staff.

We've said the same. Most of the "affordable" places can't even get the basics right. Cold food, burned/overcooked food, slow service, mistakes, etc. It's not rocket science. And that's without the fact that most chain restaurants and pubs are using the same suppliers and far too much is being "warmed" on site rather than cooked on site, which is why most menus are the same across different chains. Trouble is that a lot of the chains are now owned by "money men" and venture capitalists who don't give a toss and just want the profits, so deliberately choose to under staff and employ the cheapest staff they can get, i.e. people who can warm and microwave food rather than chefs!

I've found that I'm enjoying "cafes" more these days and tend to go out for lunch rather than evening meals. Smaller, private cafes tend to have more staff, so service is quicker and more accurate, and they often have an owner doing the cooking rather than a disinterested "pinger". Yes, the menus are more limited and not as fancy, but it tends to be better quality, even at lower prices as they are more likely to use local suppliers rather than national wholesalers, so more likely that meat is from a local butcher, bread from a local bakery, potatoes and other veg from a local greengrocer etc. I'd far rather have a good bacon bap or jacket potato from a cafe at lunchtime than a steak in a pub chain in the evening due to better service, greater chance of hot/decent food etc.

I only really go out to eat when I'm meeting friends. I have a limited food repertoire anyway as have digestive issues so I can usually only chose from a couple of menu items.
I went out for a group dinner the other night to a local place (8 of us). I had overcooked salmon for £25 and you had to buy sides separately. I could've made better at home. It was only our group and one other table in the whole place (midweek, but still).
I will pay for sushi as I can't make that at home, curry (when I could eat it as again, I'm rubbish at cooking curries).
I also hate spending over a tenner on some eggs/sourdough/avo when I eat similar at home for a couple of quid!

One final thing, A £12 meal deal at a supermarket is often very good value compared to a takeway so lots of people have these instead.

What I was trying to say was that it doesn't cost more money for the staff to bring my meal out when it's hot instead of of cold. It's the exact same amount of money so why not bring it out when it's hot. It's silly to be marked down for something so avoidable. And the getting the order wrong - it costs the same amount of money for them to serve the correct item as the wrong item. Again, a silly waste of everyone's time and a waste of my money.

And it costs them the same amount of money to bring the drinks before the meal. Furthermore, you could sell more drinks that way - so it doesn't make sense and I say again, a lot of the independants are vanity projects.

The Just Eats of this world aren't doing themselves any favours these days either. We paid £63 for 5 dishes to be delivered, 4 of which were so bad that I picked a couple of spoons out of each and chucked them in the bin. They weren't even good enough for next day leftovers.

JE made it impossible to say 'the whole meal was terrible' and eventually gave us an £11 voucher.

Which would be nice, except now I'll just never use them again.

They used to be so much better than this.

I agree. Even harvester which is easy for the kids has become really expensive. Their steak dishes went around £17 to £25 with their most recent menu update.

There are definitely businesses out there that could do better, but no business in hospitality is making lots of profit, most are barely breaking even in the current climate.

In defense of the service charge, since 95% of customers now ‘tap and go’ traditional tips have declined massively, so a service charge is a way of boosting the poor pay of hospitality staff. Yes, businesses could just put up their prices to pay their staff more, but then the business would also have to charge the customer 25% more, than the service charge, just to cover the VAT & NI. So service charges are effectively a way of keeping prices lower for customers.

Yeah. We went out for pub dinner a month or two ago, spent £110 on 2 mains, 2 starters, a coke, a G&T and some focaccia. Admittedly, I ordered the most expensive dish on the menu (venison, £29). When it turned up, it was half the size of my fist on about two slices of potato and tasted like it had been stewed in its own juices. I can ruin a perfectly good cut of venison at home, on my own, thank you very much! The focaccia was the weirdest bread I've ever had, it tasted like it had been fried - it was uncomfortable to eat. The OH's GF burger and chips looked rank. There was only 1/2 of 5 dishes worth returning for.

What really got my goat is when we went back to London for the first time in four years in December, only to discover that everything we ate there was considerably cheaper than where we are in a not especially wonderful part of the Northeast - except to say, there wasn't anything from our London meals I thought 'not worth the calories/if I served this at home I'd bin it and have wine instead.'

I have sympathy for those running businesses and I'd be prepared to support their cost increases without hesitation, if eating out didn't now feel like the chefs had been trained in the 1980s, with all the overcooking, bad flavour pairing and poor quality ingredients you used to get when eating out in much of England way back then.

In fact, I found myself saying to the OH recently 'I really miss the days when you could just have a massive doorstep cheese ploughman's sandwich and a packet of scampi fries.'

You know things have got really, really bad when it's hit and miss as to whether a pub can even serve up decent chips, which has repeatedly been my experience over the last three years.

I think I'll take a leaf out of other poster's books and just stick to michelin star restaurants now and then/maybe go to London twice a year for a foodie weekend.

It's a great shame, it really is. It was only around 5 years ago when gastro pubs were at their peak, imo, and almost everything you ordered was likely to be excellent.

Same with take aways, they aren't much cheaper than eat in nowadays.

The restaurant closest to us has some really good offers on midweek, so you go in thinking you are getting a bargain. Like 40 per couple for 3 courses, but the drinks are so expensive you can easily more than double that with a few drinks. And only a few I don’t mean drunk levels of drinking maybe one drink per course over a couple of hours

We’re the same. I hate getting to the end of a meal and saying well that was ok but not worth the ridiculous amount of money we’ve just paid for it. And then
wishing we hadn’t bothered.
We've narrowed down the number of places local to us where we think it’s actually worth to about 2 …

Re: trading challenges

I holiday in West Cornwall every August, and have done so for decades. Last year there were so many restaurants, shops and attractions closed down, it was actually quite a challenge to find things to do at times.
Places I have been visiting for years, once vibrant and busy, now closed and boarded up. Heartbreaking really.

Hospitality needs to take a long good hard look at itself to see what they can right without it costing them anything and they need to tighten up their recruitment procedures too. Not employ someone just because they are cheap to employ.
And how do you propose they do that precisely?
In this area just about every cafe and hotel has a "staff wanted" sign in the window. Lots of places have had to reduce their opening hours because they can't get staff. I stopped for lunch at a very good and popular bistro the other day and the waitress told me that they no longer open in the evenings at all because of staff shortages.
Nobody can afford to live in or close to the town if they're in a low paid job, there aren't even many families with teenage kids wanting part time work as so many houses are second homes or holiday lets, public transport is practically non existent and if you are lucky enough to have a car, parking all day in town costs a small fortune. Local workers are few and far between and Brexit plus more recent immigration rule changes have already massively cut and will continue to reduce the pool of overseas workers who used to be the backbone of the industry.
Lots of places are struggling to get any staff at all, never mind to be able to be particularly selective about who they employ. Raising wages to attract better staff is not an option as, as demonstrated on this thread, people don't want to pay higher prices. There simply isn't a pool of well trained staff waiting to be recruited - not where I live anyway.

Sone places the price has increased and quality declined

in others the price has increased more and the quality remains high

the problem is inflation has been shocking for a few years so we have a sudden increase in prices and a sudden need to tighten belts all at the same time

hopefulky things will stablise soon and we gradually get back to where we want to be

No, the issue for me is that prices have risen substantially but quality and service has declined. Why would I pay for that? It will make me sound like a pretentious twat but I’d happily spend £££ on a really really good meal with quality ingredients and excellent service (we like to try a new (to us) Michelin starred place 2-3 times a year), but I absolutely won’t pay ££ for reheated food and poor service. And too many places are like that.

We eat out less frequently than we used to as well. We can afford it but it vexes me to pay for something not terribly good, often with poorer ingredients than I'd use at home for really quite a lot of money.

I don't mind paying to go 'out out' and eat a lovely meal cooked with skill and care by someone.

But we've really cut down on the number of times we just popped out for dinner in the local pub, or lunch in a cafe or 'can't be arsed to cook' let's go out and get fish and chips.

it's a shame as I like eating out.