This is the Guardian. Today, why restaurants are struggling, but there's one meal we're still going out for. I do spend an awful lot of my life at 5 o'clock in the morning staring at a blank word document,

trying to think of new and interesting ways to talk about eating pasta in a pale room.

Grace Den is the Guardian's Restaurant Critic. She spends her life eating out and telling us what's worth spending our money on.

We came out of the pandemic. It felt more definite than ever that restaurants were important to us. It was the one thing that I heard time and time again when we were stuck indoors that we just wanted to meet and be

together and sit around Pizza Express tables and see each other eye to eye we wanted

to eat pub I we wanted to eat pub food.

We wanted to go for those fancy tasting menus on mini breaks and it'd be a little bit extravagant. And yet somehow that post-Covid fantasy didn't quite pan out.

The restaurant industry has always been tough, but in the last few months closures hit a record peak.

In 2023, almost 2,000 restaurants across England, Scotland and Wales disappeared for good.

Higher rents, a scarcity of staff, and the ever spiraling cost of food means a forecast for

2024 is no less bleak. The focus, how the cost of living crisis has changed the way we eat out.

Grace Den, you're the Guardian Restaurant Critic and the host of our brilliant sister podcast, Comfort Eating.

So it's fair to say you have a very good handle on the restaurant industry.

So if you could just tell me about how it's looked in the last couple of years how has it changed?

We came back out to restaurants and found a real state of disarray. There was a lot of things going on. We had lost loads of staff.

Lots of staff had quite rightfully gone back to Europe to see their families and didn't maybe didn't feel particularly welcome about coming here again

and had got better jobs elsewhere. Rents and rates became steeper. Places were coming out of the pandemic in a really bad

financial shape and just didn't open at all. So it was a really bumpy landscape. The one amazing thing about food and hospitality in this

country is although we maybe don't see it it is the jewel in our crown. We have got incredible chefs, incredible

passionate people that whether it's a folly or not want to put money into

restaurants. So the scene did come back and it has come back but it isn't the same.

And we hear a lot or we see a lot of headlines about there being an unprecedented scale of closures but can you tell me more about that?

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