The pubs we can’t escape

In November it was announced that Tom Kerridge was closing The Bull & Bear, his restaurant at Manchester’s Stock Exchange Hotel, part-owned by the former Manchester United footballers Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs. Neville said the needs of the hotel and restaurant had become ‘slightly disconnected’; Kerridge added that ‘for Manchester, it’s goodbye for now’. By retreating from the city, the chef can focus on his other restaurants, especially The Hand & Flowers in Marlow. His Buckinghamshire flagship has two Michelin stars and a devoted following. It is also perhaps the leading example of a category growing more powerful by the day: the fancy pub with rooms.

Between rising rents and energy costs, staff shortages and the cost of living crisis’s squeeze on disposable incomes, it is shaping up to be a tough year for restaurants. Covid was dreadful, but at least then there was more Government support. Some businesses were able to put themselves into a kind of stasis, waiting for the world to be more promising. There is no such luck this time, just the cruel facts of capitalism, in an industry that has difficult margins at the best of times. Many restaurants are closing.

Smart pubs with rooms, though, have been slowly taking over British fine dining for years. Where Kerridge leads, the rest follow. Aside from his, think of Tommy Banks’s Black Swan at Oldstead, The Angel at Hetton, The Mash Inn in Buckinghamshire, The Double Red Duke in the Cotswolds. These boast award-winning, sophisticated cooking, but they are the pole-stars for thousands of lesser imitations.

The details might differ, but the aesthetic of such pubs is unmistakable. Orwell called his dream pub the Moon Under Water; we call this new breed The Farrow & Ball. The Farrow & Ball has exposed stone walls, flagstone floors and painted accents, usually a tasteful green or duck-egg blue. The tables and chairs will be wooden. There will not be tablecloths. The chef worked somewhere in London that you may or may not have heard of, and which may or may not have been good. The menu will be short, and will mostly feature pub food that has been put through a translator to charge 50 per cent more. It might not be £155, as it is at The Hand & Flowers, but it will not be traditional ‘pub prices’. Rather than a list of bar snacks, it will simply offer a Scotch egg for £9.

The loos will smell of soap: Aesop or, for those who have decided Aesop is too basic, Austin Austin. Above all, there will be rooms to stay in, and these will cost £120 to £250 a night, depending on where you are. The pints will be approaching London prices. There may or may not be a dog, who may or may not be an actor.

The logic of the pub with rooms is obvious, particularly in straitened times. If you are taking over a pub, you want to make the most of the building. Luring guests overnight, you can flog pre-dinner drinks and breakfast, too, as well as that ill-advised third bottle of wine before bed. And in some senses, many of these places are a great improvement on what came before: better wine, better cooking, clean rooms with decent linen. But this creeping homogeneity also speaks of conservatism. Well-funded spruceups are helping to force out idiosyncratic boozers that were a vital part of the landscape. Once upon a time, the only place you could eat out was a pub with a room; they were called inns. If we’re not careful, it’s all we’ll have left.