The horror of socially distanced restaurants

What does a critic do when her genre collapses? Mostly I panic. I speak to restaurateurs who believe that without government help into 2022, many British restaurants will close.

Most restaurants rent their premises; even if landlords defer collection, the debt will be unpayable. Most restaurants operate on slender margins; they cannot secure finance even in happy times. It is a scandal that the government has excluded monies from the service charge ‘tronc fund’ from the 80 per cent calculations in the Job Retention Scheme, even though it has received National Insurance contributions on it for years, and many restaurant staff are getting only 40 per cent of their earnings.

Restaurants predict a summer slaughter. What will survive? That is easy: the cheapest and the most expensive; the inedible and the vulgar. The middle, though, will collapse. Almost every restaurant I love is in the middle, because that is where taste lies. It is a paradigm of what is to come.

Look to America, where Donald Trump offered consolation only to the owners of the restaurants he likes: McDonald’s, which he serves to visitors, like a child; Domino’s; Wendy’s. Ponder it, before it is too late.

In the meantime, we are seeing — though not yet here — the phenomenon of the socially distanced restaurant, a sort of haven for Scrooge McDuck, which will be necessary if the distancing endures until Christmas. It isn’t profitable: it’s performative, a prayer, a ghost limb wobbling in the hope it will return. Chefs have been tweeting photographs of what their socially distanced restaurants will look like: they look like morgues populated with the still alive. They look like hospitals. I suppose Le Louis XV de Alain Ducasse in Monte Carlo is already a socially distanced restaurant, as they seem to have only five tables — plus a full-sized tree, indoors — but I wouldn’t eat there for pleasure.