Prices at top UK restaurants 'have doubled since Brexit'

The price of a meal in the UK's best restaurants has more than doubled since Brexit, from £100 a head to over £200, according to two new guides.< /p>

Peter Harden, the editor of his eponymous restaurant guides, said: "We have moved very quickly from an era where five years ago where charging more from £100 per head was the outlier, to now, when for the best restaurants £200 per head are becoming the norm."

For the first time, the guide to Harden's London restaurants have raised their maximum price threshold to £130 per person to reflect record menu price increases.The 2023 edition includes 15 restaurants in the capital with a guide price of over £200 per person, up from six in this slice this year -spacefinder-role="richLink" data-spacefinder-type="model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.RichLinkBlockElement" class= "dcr-1mfia18"/>

And Harden's Best British Restaurants for 2023, published next month, will list 12 venues outside London charging more than £200 per person, up from eight this year. They include Britain's most expensive restaurant Ynyshir Hall in Ceredigion, Wales, where the 32-course tasting menu costs £410pp.

It describes the restaurant, which has two Michelin stars, as a "big darling of the British fooderati", but he notes that many of his critics now consider it "ridiculously overpriced".

Harden said: "If you go back to our first post-Brexit edition in London in 2017, then there was only one restaurant costing over £150, now there are 37, and there are has 154 in the guide above the £100 level."

He added: "This phenomenon is not limited to London. The price of the most dear in our UK guide this year is £430, for Ynyshir in Wales. He added, referring to Heston Blumenthal's restaurant in Berkshire: "Nowadays it's quite difficult to s get Fat Duck for less than £1000 for two."

One ​​of Harden's reporters described the Fat Duck as "incredibly overpriced...we ate at several stars Michelin one at the same time, which we enjoyed much more, and you could have had almost four meals at these restaurants for the price of one at the Fat Duck".

Harden said some UK restaurants were now charging "staggering amounts that would have been inconceivable in the UK just a few years ago".

< p class="dcr-18sg7f2">Harden said the Brexit posed an existential threat to the restaurant industry, partly because of rising food prices, but mainly because of the added cost of hiring staff.

He said: "Brexit was absolutely disastrous for trade. We launched our guide 32 years ago before the Maastricht Treaty. The ability to recruit Europeans has been a major driver of the restaurant revolution that has taken place in the UK over the past 25 years or so. [In] most of the best restaurants… over 80% of their staff would have been European.

"Britain woke up to good quality food. Now the question is how many of us can afford it and is there anyone to serve it?" "Many choose to charge customers prepaid fixed prices.

He explained, "The tasting menu has become much more prevalent, to help restaurants calculate their margins. For many, the answer is simply to feed fewer people and open less.

“The a la carte menu is really a bit dead in the best restaurants. It becomes impossible to enter and taste the highlife by having a main course and a glass of wine. Now you have to spend four hours eating 32 dishes and come out completely stuffed to the gills. This gives restaurants a lot more certainty. »

The Fat Duck has been approached for comment.

Prices per person at Harden's best restaurants in London in 2023

Araki £380

Kitchen Table £330

Endo at the Rotunda £285

Roketsu £285

History £272

< p class="dcr -18sg7f2">Maru £242

Ledbury £236

Ikoyi £231

Core £226

Ala...