Finding it increasingly difficult to justify eating out at pubs etc

[JupiterJa]

This is something I’ve always enjoyed doing, but I just find the financial outlay to be hard to justify now. A fairly average meal is now usually between £17-£20 (say a burger, or fish and chips) with a pint or glass of wine usually over £6. I just don’t feel the experience warrants the outlay now, especially midweek, so these trips are becoming rarer and rarer.

Not so long ago £15 would comfortably cover everything and I felt that was good value.

Does anyone else find themselves making less frequent visits now?

the last few times I've eaten out I've been served cold food, have had to wait to wait until my main course was served until my drink was given and been given the wrong order.

None of the above require money to get right. 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.

I like the independants but they all seem to be vanity projects.

They do cost money to keep right

yiu need enough , well motivated and skilled staff to get food and drinks to people in a timely fashion and recruitment is quite hard into this industry

We don’t eat out much anymore - £150-£200 for a family of four to eat somewhere decent with no alcohol is a lot regardless of your income. It’s close to £100 at pizza express fgs which used to be somewhere you’d stop for lunch on a shopping trip or something. We end up sharing chips, drinks or I order a kids meal in places like five guys or Archie’s to keep a quick lunch under £50.

It’s unsustainable and I do feel for the industry and the workers but I don’t have an answer as I can’t justify spending a week’s shopping budget on one reasonable meal more than a couple of times a year.

I'm getting good at sniffing out deals. Last week we went out for pie and mash and a pint (£12.50 meal deal, so £25 for the two of us, seemed fair enough). Our (relatively) local does stuff like 1kg of spicy chicken wings for a tenner, and gives us doggy bag, so it lasts us the meal and for lunch the next day.

I don't go out for meals anymore, unless I have friend visiting.

I think the level of food quality/service isn't great and prices are too high for me with the cost of living crisis.

Instead, I will sometime go just for a hot chocolate and a cake but that's a treat maybe once a month, if that.

I just tale my own food and a flask with tea or hot water with lemon when I am out and about or at work.

Feel completely the same. We recently ate a busy restaurant/bar and got a burger and a chicken schnitzel. No inquiries how the burger should be cooked or anything. Food arrived within 5 mins so obviously pre cooked. 3 pints ordered. Bill was £80 with service charge. I was so annoyed.

We still eat out at least once a week. Not necessarily in pubs, because I would say that while we have a lot of eating places near us, none of the pubs are really 'food pubs' - they sell food, but it's nothing special and usually something that would actually be nicer if I cooked it myself! I love a gastropub but they're a bit lacking near me at the moment. But we do eat out in various other places.

This has been my experience too. Even coffee and cake at a café is no longer a relatively inexpensive treat and it's something DH and I have less frequently than we used to, though not never because it's important to us that cafés should stay afloat. I'd once have thought someone was a bit tight if they suggested just having a main course in a restaurant and then going home for coffee and a slice of cake, but now, with coffee and a small dessert adding £12 per person to the bill, I have become that person.

This is the problem, of course it costs money, you've even said yourself that they shouldn't employ people because they're cheap...... So they should be paying more for decent staff, training them adequately etc....... yet you who wants that level of service feel ripped off for paying for it?
Should hospitality staff be serving you simply for the privilege of doing so?

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. That's always been the issue in hospitality, people demand the service and demand it's good but don't think it's valuable enough to pay for.
And that's why we are where we are, because the service provided by the industry has been devalued to be worth nothing when you're delivering it, but seemingly the most important aspect when you're receiving it.

Unfortunately there's not an endless supply of people willing to serve others for poor wages and conditions, and being resented to boot.

Though there seems to be an awful lot of people who are experts and know how it should be done, and that it won't cost as much as they're being charged, seems to me there's a gap in the market, maybe they should be out there being the pioneers of hospitality and showing the rest of the industry how it's done?

Burgers need to be cooked through thoroughly, otherwise there is a risk of food poisoning.

Decent service is only one aspect of the eating out experience.

The issue is with the businesses, not the consumers, and they need to get imaginative so they stop losing as much custom as they clearly are. Yes, they have overheads and need to make profit but it's pure laziness and complacency to charge £12 for an average burger or salad and then have the nerve to add on a ludicrous service charge. Some places deserve to go under, quite frankly.

I understand that all costs have risen but I don’t like paying a high price for a poor quality meal.

If I am eating out I expect it to be freshly cooked, not just something they have bought in frozen from a catering company and reheated, or I might as well have a ready meal from the supermarket.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 …

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.