Eating in a restaurant/ pub is not worth the money

[HoppingKangaroo]

Not eaten in a restaurant or pub this year. Went for a pub meal the other day. The cheapest meal was 14 pounds. The food was just okay and not really worth the cost. I can make something just as nice at home. AIBU to think with how expensive pubs and restaurants are now it is not worth the cost? Especially if you can make something almost or just as nice at home.

When a restaurant removes the children's menu it usually a sign that they no longer want children as customers. I would take the kids elsewhere.

I agree.

I've pretty much always thought this, in the UK at least, and yes I know there must be lovely expensive restaurants with good food. I have always found the food mediocre at best, and couldn't help thinking I could get a week's shopping for what we're paying for one meal.

Depends entirely on the quality of the food. I don’t eat out in places where the food comes out of the freezer and into the fryer. I do eat in my local pub where they make everything from scratch.

Hospitality is on its knees. Some of our suppliers have put prices up 300%. We are working with very low margins and most weeks we are making a loss.

If people can afford to eat out, please do. We are doing our best and the great British Pub is under real threat.

Value for money is definitely a consideration for me. I refuse to pay restaurant prices for food I don't enjoy, can make at home with little effort or can get similar from a takeaway or supermarket.

When we eat out, we tend to go for Thai or Vietnamese due to the specialist ingredients and lots of chopping, or Indian street food, because I can't get most of it right.

If I want a steak, grilled fish or garlic prawns, I can just make that at home in about five minutes, so do that instead.

If I'm going out I want to eat something different to what I can cook at home (with the exception of a Sunday roast )
I don't understand the apparent snobbery around weatherspoons , it does what it says on the tin,

But household budgets are also under stress and people are thinking twice about spending the cost of a weekly shop on a restaurant meal, that's often not even as nice as they could make themselves with little effort.

I've eaten out for many years at various venues, upscale and downscale.

I agree that where now the food has probably been heated in a microwave I probably won't return.

There have also been price increases post Covid.

It depends on the restaurant now - if it's worth it, I'll eat there, if not, then I won't. I don't really care about the bleating that hospitality is on it's knees and working with low margins, restaurants and pubs seem to forget that value for money and proper food is what people value most so why try to fob us off with substandard microwaved food?!

I can cook food that's as nice as any restaurant I've ever been to. I cook all the time. I really enjoy it mostly and it's nice being good at something. But no-one cooks for me, pretty much ever. So that's what I pay for when I eat out.

The thing is I don't mind paying more for good food. What I do mind is paying loads for bad or average food, coupled with poor service.

Saturday night DH and I ate out at a "gastro pub" (part of a smallish chain). We paid £100 for 2 mains, two puddings and two drinks. We were sat at our table for half an hour before we even got our drink. The food was average. It wasn't the £100 I resented, it was that the experience we got for it (because I agree with others, I eat out for more than just the food) was poor. It was bad value for money - yes because of the food, but also because of the inflated prices and bad service.

So basically if restaurants/pubs want us to return then they need to make the experience good, value for money etc.

Several times over past year or so I've had microwaved food. Which is fine if that's what I know it is and priced accordingly. But if they try to pass it off as their own food, freshly cooked then of course it irritates me. I'm lucky where I live there are a few pubs and restaurants which have chefs and don't microwave food, surprise surprise they have lots of custom.

One of the popular pubs has had to have a rebrand inside and presumably the menu as they'd stepped off the mark recently and fewer people were eating there.

I don't mind paying higher prices as long as the food is good and not microwaved!

I agree @BarbaraofSeville , so many people leaned to cook properly in lockdown and are weighing up whether it's worth going out or not
I think twice about it when I see the prices
Sad really

Yes you can cook at home as well as or better than most restaurants.
As I've got £ richer and time poorer though, sometimes I don't care about the £ cost, it's just nice not to cook and enjoy an evening.

Agreed with bad service. I've been in gastro pubs/restaurants where you can see they have lots of staff and the service has been dire.

Went to a busy upmarket cafe for lunch at the weekend and the service was great (as was the food), always someone around to ensure we had our food, quite good service, and they were busy. No wonder they (as a chain) are always busy.

Those working in the hospitality industry really have my sympathies.

We have lots of lovely restaurants near us, we don’t typically eat out as family because of the young children and bed times and so on. We did go for lunch last weekend however, and paid £65 for two adults & two kid pub meals. I thought it was cheap, quality ok, but then it did strike me later, I could do a lot with £65, I would have to wash and cook though 🤷🏻‍♀️ It totally depends on your preferences and what you determine to be “worth it”.

Prices for everything are rising and businesses need to keep things going or shut down, it's as simple as that.
When supplier costs increase then you have 3 options, increase your own prices in line with those, but that can lead to losing business because people feel it's too expensive, even though the margins are the same, or keep your prices the same but reduce what's offered, portion sizes etc, again, keeping the margins the same, or a bit of both, so increase prices a bit and reduce portion sizes a bit so you've not massively changed either. You can also reduce staff which reduces service and then people complain, but we can't have it all ways, when prices of the supplies used to provide the meal, not just the food but the fuel to cook it, the people to cook and serve and clear up, then the prices charged for those meals need to increase in order to continue to provide them.
Hospitality is also on it's arse staff wise, so if you want staff, and you want the good ones, they need to be paid to reflect that.
I really don't envy my manager ATM facing these types of choices and I'm concerned about the long term effects it's going to have and if that's going to put my job at risk - less places viable to stay open means less jobs to move to if I should lose mine.

Although I agree it's important to support the hospitality industry and keep the economy moving, it just isn't affordable for families like mine to eat out regularly at nice pubs and restaurants.

We had Sunday lunch at a pub recently. The roasts were nice but nearly £20 each. The service wasn't great. My daughter had a kids meal with sausages which she didn't like (they didn't taste like proper sausages either). We spoke to our server about it but they didn't care. What we spent on the meal could have been a week's worth of shopping.

I feel like meals out at nice pubs and restaurants should be saved for special occasions these days. I would rather get a takeaway if not prepared to cook.

Excluding those attached to pubs, I've been to two restaurants this year, a fish one and a Japanese one. Both were chosen by who I was meeting, both worked out at £70 a head. Half a bottle of wine with the fish £70, no alcohol with the Japanese one. The fish restaurant was a little bit posh, the Japanese one ordinary but with good reviews.

It's been a decade or two since I've regularly eaten in restaurants, I remember regarding over £25 a head as relatively expensive.

I've had a posh Japanese restaurant lined up for the near future, and think it's going to be even more. Haven't dared look yet. (I can afford it, just wouldn't choose to, if I were the only one whose preferences mattered.)

I agree with you. My
Local pub is expensive for what it is. But going to a restaurant is always worth it.

Independent restaurants worked at a very small margin before the pandemic, and now with escalating costs for produce and bills on top of recovering from lost revenue due to covid, it is getting harder and harder by the day to stay afloat (often running into the negative). Yes, we've had to put prices up, but we want to pay our employees a living wage, and be around to actually employ them rather than shutting up shop! And this is not in any way melodrama - it is the reality we're currently facing.

I like to eat out because it’s nice to have someone else cook for you and bring you dinner and am happy to pay for that service but agree in terms of quality of food most pubs and restaurants these days are very very mediocre for the price. I generally feel a bit meh about most meals eaten out these days.

In Portugal we ate out for breakfast, lunch and dinner and regardless of it being cheap as chips cafes or higher end restaurants the quality was consistently excellent.

The problem is that we had 20 years of unlimited cheap labour, cheap food and cheap energy which allowed a unsustainable number of restaurants to open

This, plus also all the coffee shops, cafes, lunch places, fast food etc.

It will be interesting to see how the likes of Pizza Express and other chain restaurants fair in times of rising interest rates as they've been financed using very cheap debt that might not continue, especially if their customers think twice about paying £100 to take the family for pizza, pasta etc that is no better than what you get in the supermarket.

Lots of things people choose to buy are more expensive than what could be produced at home.
Clothes
Meals
DIY

The clue is in the word "choose". And that includes where ,and if, you go to eat out.