Central London’s abandoned restaurants need love too

You walk into a nice bar in central London expecting to have a quick snack and walk out £150 poorer. That’s the way these establishments operate, built upon squeezing the life out of your wallet, most of the time for little nutritional gain. The Blue Boar Bar in Westminster is a perfect example of this. Ministers and political hacks don’t go there for tender beef or smooth wine but because of the convenience of its location. A five-minute walk from Parliament, it’s one of the few places to which a creature of Westminster can retreat for a katsu chicken burger before returning to the political trenches.

It was little surprise, then, given the combination of parliamentary recess and social distancing, that the place was completely desolate when I returned yesterday to dine under the Chancellor’s Eat Out to Help Out offer. For once the political cartoons adorning its walls seemed out of place, almost creepy. You could hear a pin-drop in the bar, which was surrounded by rows of barren tables. The waiters stood beside our seats like wild vultures, awaiting what must have been their first order of the day. “No business,” one of them complained. “And no more if you don’t step back,” I should have replied.

This overpriced, posh joint, so often responsible for my student overdraft, was now in need of charity. I planned to tip the waiters, but then my bill arrived, £82 at a discount.

The Boar isn’t alone in its plight. Across Victoria, restaurants and bars are either shuttered or empty. Few things have changed for this district since lockdown was implemented, and it will likely remain in a state of coma until there is a substantial medical breakthrough. Restaurants in SW1 were built around workplaces and tourist hotspots. Until those two things return, they’ll have to rely on the lunatics willing to travel to central London, enduring face-mask rules, to pay inflated prices for meals.

The suburbs, on the other hand, are booming. Social media feeds have been flooded with videos of packed local restaurants since Sunak’s subsidy came into force. High-street cafes and independent bars must be seeing an unprecedented boost in demand. But the problem is that these smaller establishments are not as equipped as their centrally-located cousins to take advantage of increased demand. They do not benefit from economies of scale that allow larger businesses to hire more workers at a lower rate.

This is a uniquely treacherous moment for London’s central districts. Professionals in other European capitals have returned to their offices at much higher rates. The reality is that to have a V-shaped economic recovery, we Londoners need to return to our immoderate habits. We need to embrace overpriced steak and pretentious waiters, because central London’s hospitality ecosystem provides the basis for thousands of jobs.

We should Eat Out to Help Out the poshies, too, to save the city we love.