My favourite local restaurant closed last week. Saigon Saigon had been serving upscale Vietnamese food to the residents of West London’s Hammersmith and Chiswick for well over a decade. Our family loved it so much, my daughter had part of her 21st birthday party there in a basement that became a nightclub in the way that only independent restaurants can both contemplate and execute with charm. It produced consistently delicious food served by wonderful staff. We are bereft.
Saigon Saigon’s demise followed that of Mes Amis, another local institution: an eccentric, chaotic Middle Eastern restaurant, in which you walked through the owner’s living room, where his elderly mum sat watching television, to go to the loo. Still within walking distance, another family-owned restaurant Best Mangal, home to many a family Turkish feast, has gone too. Biryani Pot, Ksara, Villagio, Ngon Deli may not mean anything to you, but these and other of our local options have all disappeared since the pandemic. Not to mention local pubs like The Old Suffolk Punch, plunged into darkness despite briefly being an inspired experimental KFC pub named the Colonel’s Arms.
I feel partly to blame. Best Mangal aside, I haven’t been to any of these establishments for more than a year, perhaps two. I kept telling people about Saigon Saigon, but I haven’t set foot in there for 18 months. A double whammy of being on a teacher’s salary and having to prepare lessons on weeknights means I am now both time and cash poor. The extraordinary array of cheap and tasty local options on Deliveroo, plus the fact my new school serves delicious lunches means I also have less of an inclination to eat out. I am not alone in having hugely challenged disposable income.
Walking back from a darkened Best Mangal the other night, tummies grumbling, we couldn’t help but notice how quiet, to the point of dead, the streets were – that’s in the capital, at 8pm. The sheer number of shuttered shops and restaurants was depressingly eye-opening. Hospitality is in crisis. The “perfect storm”, as one restaurant owner describes it, of Brexit-induced staff shortages, the Covid lockdowns and now the cost of living crisis have resulted in record numbers of closures of licenced premises: the last quarter of 2022 was the worst on record for restaurant closures and the carnage continues. Meanwhile, pub closures hit their own record high in the second quarter of this year, according to Price Bailey. What can we do?
We can try to find a way to eat the added cost to help them survive. But I’m not sure that spending our limited disposable income locally can really be enough. How can we spend more money in local establishments than the amount that their business rates go up? We can’t fix staff shortages that force some establishments to close for lunch. We have no control over infrastructure issues that force businesses to close. We need some truly imaginative ideas from the political party conferences for our high streets’ future and some business rate relief and concessions on worker visas for our desperate hospitality sector. Our struggling local restaurateurs are not holding their breath.
