Before Stanley Tucci was Stanley Tucci, he was just another out-of-work actor striving to make ends meet by pulling front-of-house shifts in a restaurant. “Like so many people in the arts, without the income and flexible hours that restaurant work affords,” he told me, “I would have struggled to support myself until I was able to do so as an actor.” The theatre star Anna-Jane Casey says she needed that work to sustain herself through gaps between jobs. Likewise, the Sherwood and Dear England writer James Graham says working in restaurants enabled him to take in shows and make contacts through numerous Edinburgh festivals. Or as Jamie Dornan says, about his barman years before his big break: “It’s great for learning people skills, communication and dealing with wankers. All very handy in entertainment.”
The hospitality sector, which provided all these brilliant, creative people with vital employment in the early years of their careers, faces unprecedented challenges. At least five British restaurants closed every day in 2023, up 45% from the year before. About 50 pubs closed every month in the first half of 2024. The newsbites at the bottom of my reviews online have become a litany of the fallen: farewell Cafe Kitty and Copper and Ink; goodbye Frenchie, and Beverley’s the Pig and Whistle. And it’s likely only to get worse. Post-Covid, the hospitality sector was granted 100% relief from business rates, which dropped to 75% in 2022. Next April it will be phased out altogether, adding a likely £1bn in costs. That comes on top of food and fuel price inflation and the general squeeze on incomes, which in turn has limited custom.
We think of restaurant and pub closures in terms of chef and bar staff jobs lost and eating opportunities withdrawn. Our once vibrant hospitality sector, which pre-pandemic was worth almost £100bn, is shrinking fast. With it so are our lives. All of that is obviously true. But the impact of its sharp decline will be felt elsewhere too, not least at the very heart of our cultural lives. Because, as Tucci, Dornan, Casey, Graham and so many others attest, a web of hospitality jobs has long been what has kept struggling actors, writers, musicians and artists going through the lean years. They offer vital flexibility. In effect they prime the pump for the arts. Without those starter jobs, we limit who can make it to the few who have access to the bank of mum and dad.
“It took me three years to earn any money from playwriting,” says Graham, who this year used his McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival to highlight how few people in the industry come from working-class backgrounds. “I would have struggled to survive in a city like London without those jobs,” he says. Casey, currently starring in Fawlty Towers in the West End, agrees. “For me hospitality and performance go hand in hand.” And it’s not about just any job; creatives are suited to this sort of work. “Anybody can pull a pint but it’s about the connection between staff and punter.”
It would be easy to dismiss all this as just the whingeing of self-absorbed luvvies. But we risk, a few years from now, discovering that the music we listen to, the shows we watch, and the books we read are produced by a grim and ever-narrowing range of people, simply because those from less affluent backgrounds couldn’t get the work they needed to see them through. Yes, financially viable restaurants are about nice meals out. But, as it happens, they are about much more besides.
