What Actually Keeps an Independent Restaurant Alive?

I have just recorded an episode of Newsnight about hospitality. It won’t air for another two weeks because the government is currently such a mess that it's in full crisis mode coverage. But still, the fact the conversation is happening is really important. I’ll be alongside Tom Kerridge, Simon Rogan and Yotam Ottolenghi, all talking about different parts of what’s happening to hospitality in this country. VAT, staffing, community, local economies.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I actually want to say. Because we don’t own a huge restaurant group. We don’t have investors. We’re not backed by private equity. We are, like so many others, just a chef couple who wanted to open a restaurant in the place we live.

That’s it really. People with a skill who had an ongoing dream. People trying to build something meaningful.

I’d like to say that a year in, everything is smooth and steady and professionally organised. In reality, I can’t quite believe we opened in the chaotic unpreparedness that we did. I look back now and think: poor naive us. Did we know the tidal wave that was about to hit us in the face? Absolutely not.

Have I had the most thrilling ride of my life doing this? Fuck yes. Are we deeply anxious about the financial climate and the future of restaurants? Completely.

Running a restaurant is actually remarkably similar to having a newborn for the first time. You’re constantly anxious, permanently exhausted, running on adrenaline and surviving on meals eaten standing up or hunched over at strange hours of the night. The only difference is that with a baby you occasionally get rewarded with a sleepy cute contact nap or a tiny weird new quirk that makes you cry with love. Eating fast food at midnight after a brutal shift just doesn’t hit quite the same way it did when I was awake with Donnie in those early months.

And yet, despite all of that, it has also become one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done because of the people it has pulled together around us.

My mum was our KP this weekend because our actual KP went on paternity leave. We paid him full leave, happily, timed so he could have a whole month with his newborn baby… only for him not to come back afterwards. Which, honestly, felt both totally devastating and extremely hospitality at the same time. Know what I mean? My mum called me afterwards completely out of breath saying: “I LOVED IT.” “What? Washing up?”

Yes. She loved it. As a lifelong clean obsessive she was absolutely in her element. And because one of our runners, Hamja was on shift, speaks Urdu, she attached herself to him immediately. Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati - if you speak one of those languages my mum will find you and adopt you instantly.

That’s the thing I wish more people understood about independent restaurants. They are ecosystems of people holding each other up.

For the first six months after opening, my mum washed and ironed all our aprons at her home. My dad still helps us with our accounts, petty cash, GP reports and spending trackers before packaging them up neatly for our accountants. My brother works FOH shifts around his finance job, builds financial models for us and makes a point to tell us when we absolutely cannot spend money on something. He’s also annoyingly better with customers than I am, doesn’t get rattled and loves giving away free desserts.

If I’m completely in the shit, which happens regularly, my dad picks Donnie up from nursery. My best friend’s dad assembled a load of high chairs for us on a Friday night and brought them back the next morning ready to go. One of my closest friends is basically our 24-hour IT support line. Our AGM built my toddler tower last week because flatpack furniture makes me very confused.

And then there’s the team themselves. Watering the plants outside. Planting them in the first place. Caring about the space like it belongs to them too. Because it does. This restaurant has never felt like “my business”. It feels like a collective effort by people who want something nice to exist on our high street. Which is why I find the current conversation around hospitality so frustrating.

Restaurants, pubs and cafes are constantly spoken about like they are luxuries. 

They are treated as optional extras. Nice little lifestyle businesses. But when independent hospitality disappears, what disappears with it?

Jobs disappear.
First jobs disappear.
Community disappears.
A reason to be on the high street disappears.

You notice it immediately when an area loses its independent businesses. A place starts to feel quieter, emptier and less alive. The hardest part is that so many of us are trying to do the “right” thing. All of these things; employing people properly, paying fairly, buying responsibly, supporting local producers, creating nice environments to work in, they are all so crucial to what we do.

But the economics are becoming harder and harder to make work.

The rise in Employer National Insurance has had a huge impact on labour-heavy industries like hospitality. And hospitality is uniquely labour-heavy. We cannot function without people. A restaurant cannot automate itself into existence. At the same time, all the costs around us continue to rise: wages, produce, rent, utilities, suppliers. You know the deal. At some point there is simply nothing left at the end.

Profit has somehow become a dirty word in this conversation, when actually profit is what allows businesses to survive sustainably. Profit is fixing the fridge when it breaks, or the burst dishwasher pipe we were dealing with this morning. It’s giving someone a pay rise. It’s replacing broken furniture. It’s opening another site and employing more people. It’s having enough breathing room to keep going.

A customer recently messaged me saying how much she loved her meal, but suggested we should upgrade the terrace furniture. Fair enough. But a new terrace setup could easily cost £7k. People often imagine restaurants are sitting on endless cash, when in reality every repair, improvement or investment comes from whatever tiny margin is left at the end.

Without it, businesses stagnate. Then they disappear.

One of the things that worries me most is young people.

We get asked incredibly frequently if we can hire local teenagers for their first jobs. Hospitality is one of the few industries where someone can walk in with no qualifications and genuinely build a life for themselves. But training inexperienced staff costs time, money and labour, and the gap between youth wages and adult wages has narrowed so sharply that independent businesses are finding it harder and harder to absorb those costs.

I want to hire them. I increasingly understand why people can’t. At a moment where AI is already replacing so many entry-level jobs elsewhere, it feels completely backwards that we are making it harder to employ actual humans. 

I’m not writing this because I think restaurants deserve sympathy. We chose this life. And despite everything, I still love it deeply. I love feeding people. I love our regulars. I love a busy Friday night. I love watching shy young staff members grow in confidence. I love seeing local people use the restaurant as part of their weekly lives. I love that, in this tiny pocket of an unassuming high street, we somehow built somewhere people want to be.

I just think independent hospitality needs to be seen properly and understood for what it really is: a network of people, livelihoods, communities and first chances, all holding each other together. Once those places disappear, they rarely come back.

If you’ve read this and you’re wondering what you can actually do with all of this, the answer is quite simple:

Use your local high street.

Go to the independent cafe instead of ordering another takeaway chain coffee. Book the neighbourhood restaurant you keep meaning to try. Buy the loaf of bread from the bakery. Go to the pub quiz (or the psychic night!). Tell your friends about the places you love. Keep showing up for the businesses that make your area feel like somewhere people actually live, not just pass through. Because independent hospitality survives through habit as much as anything else.

I know money is tight for everyone right now. I know eating out has become more expensive we are all feeling it. However, I also know that once independent places disappear, they are incredibly hard to bring back. What’s left is usually emptier, quieter and much less human.

I think a lot about the ecosystem we’ve accidentally built in this tiny corner of our high street. The staff, the farmers, growers, the runners, the regulars, the families, the people watering plants outside, my mum chatting away in various languages while washing up, the Friday night noise, the feeling that something alive is happening in there.

That’s the thing worth protecting.

Not just restaurants.
People.

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Newsnight airs on the 28th of May. This article was originally published in Ravneet Gill's Substack, No Days Off. You can read more articles and sign up here.