As the consumer editor of the Evening Standard yesterday noted, London is undergoing a very odd recession. “Blimey”, he says, “I’ve known more austere boom times”. Among the statistics he cites is Harden’s own research, published in August, which noted that recently restaurant closures have been running at pretty much their lowest level this millennium. An article on Nation’s Restaurant News (US) today, however, emphasises just how different things are in the Big Apple.
The “New York foodservice community is struggling with a hostile business climate that already has overpowered several of the city’s biggest restaurants”, the article begins, with “more than 500 New York restaurants [having] closed their doors this year, and others are expected to follow”.
Restaurants affected include such landmarks as the Tavern on the Green (perhaps the second-biggest grossing restaurant in the US), Café des Artistes (almost a century old) and the Rainbow Room (on the 65th floor of the Rockefeller Center). These have closed or “face operational hurdles”. Local guidebook publisher Tim Zagat notes that “there is a sense that several major iconic restaurants are in play [or transition]”. He suggests as a specific problem that the restaurants under threat “are among the relatively few New York City restaurants that are unionized.”
But it’s not just among the behemoths of Midtown that there are problems. Michael Whiteman, a New York City-based restaurant consultant is quoted as saying: “Lots of smaller, less-visible places are shuttering, and there’s been a steep decline in the number of people eating out and the amount they are spending,” The reason, he says, is simply that the market got ahead of itself, opening too many restaurants pitched too expensively.
As the NRN article concludes, however, “this is not just a restaurant problem” – “take a bus down Fifth Avenue from 59th Street to 14th Street and gasp at all the empty storefronts.” Well, for whatever reason – and it very likely has something to do with just how much the capital’s higher earners are benefitting from lower mortgage rates – it certainly ain’t like that on Oxford Street. For once the paths of London and our ‘twin city’ have quite strikingly diverged. How long can that last, we wonder?
PS By an odd coincidence, Richard Vines at Bloomberg chose the same day to do one of his ring-around-round-ups. Today’s conclusion was just how difficult it still is to get a prime-restaurant Friday-night booking in London at short notice.
Most difficult table to pull? Harden’s best restaurant of the moment, Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley. Easiest? Michelin’s second-best restaurant in London (after Gordon Ramsay), Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester. There’s a moral in there somewhere!
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