English pubs and restaurants scramble to create outdoor space

A UK government edict allowing al fresco dining from April has prompted a scramble to create outdoor seating space, with restaurant and pub operators desperate to claw back revenues lost during lockdown.

Hospitality businesses across England are planning to open terraces or expand on to pavement areas after ministers ruled that restaurants and pubs could serve customers outside only in the first instance when they are permitted to reopen on April 12.

Pub company Punch said this week that it was investing £1m in outdoor space, while the landlord Cadogan, which owns large parts of Kensington and Chelsea, said that it was adding 500 seats to newly pedestrianised streets in the area.

Some hospitality businesses are reporting higher demand for outdoor tables than when they reopened in July last year.

The River Café in London said it was almost fully booked for April with just a few weekday lunch slots available, while D&D, which runs 38 restaurants in London, Manchester and Leeds, said it planned to open the terraces at 20 of its sites amounting to around 1,100 places per sitting. It had already had 60,000 bookings up to the first week in May.

“We are well over double the number of bookings ahead of opening compared with when we opened last year, and last year we had the whole restaurant to book,” said D&D chief executive Des Gunewardena. But, he added, the cost of reopening was in the “hundreds of thousands”.

Clive Watson, executive chair of City Pub Company, which runs pubs across London and south east England, said that investment in outdoor spaces was costing around £4,000 to £5,000 per pub.

Some operators such as pub group JD Wetherspoon and café-bar chain Loungers have warned that they will still face losses, despite the gradual easing of restrictions.

Though S4labour, a provider of staff management software for the industry, said it was forecasting industry revenues would be 70 per cent of what they were in 2019 in the week following April 12, even with only outside space open.

Food delivery business Supper, which is used by restaurants such as Nobu and Hakkasan, has even set up pick up points in 13 London parks in anticipation of demand.

Operators have expanded al fresco areas in a bid to bring in as much cash as possible before the current relief on business rates ends and a moratorium on evictions for tenants that have not paid rent during the crisis is lifted.

Figures from trade body UKHospitality showed that because of a cap on the amount of relief they can claim, 7,619 venues will be liable for full business rates within nine days of being able to reopen fully on June 21.

A further 1,850 will be paying full rates before September.

“The cap will put an economic drag on these businesses and affects the jobs that they support,” UKHospitality said. It is campaigning for rates relief to be extended to September, in line with the phasing out of the furlough scheme.

Gunewardena said that the removal of business rates relief would hold back the group’s full recovery until 2022. “If [the government] could have kept rates relief where they were, we would have got back to pre-covid [levels] by the end of this year,” he said.