The minimum wage rise that was supposed to make eating out unaffordable has made eating out slightly more expensive

Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

Lowri Griffiths writes from North London on London restaurants and the economics of Tuesday evening.

The April Wage Rise

Every April, the UK minimum wage increases, and every April, the hospitality industry issues statements explaining why this will make restaurants economically unviable, and every September the restaurants have adjusted their prices by between 3 and 5 percent and continued operating, which is what the empirical evidence of minimum wage increases in sectors with inelastic demand suggests should happen. The April 2026 increase to 12.21 pounds per hour produced the usual statements and the usual outcome. London restaurants are more expensive. London restaurants are still open.

The Tuesday Evening Calculation

I do the Tuesday evening calculation approximately once a week, which involves looking at the prices on a menu app and deciding whether this particular Tuesday evening justifies the cost of dinner out versus the cost of cooking at home, which in North London in June 2026 involves a range of options between 18 and 45 pounds per person for a restaurant meal versus approximately 4 pounds per person for a reasonable home-cooked dinner. The calculation has a consistent outcome. I eat at home on Tuesdays. This is not a political statement about the minimum wage.

The Industry and Its Resilience

The London hospitality industry’s resilience in the face of energy cost increases, ingredient cost increases, wage increases, and the specific challenges of the post-pandemic labour market is the story of a sector that operates on margins that economists describe as unsustainable and that continues sustaining itself through a combination of pricing adjustment, operational efficiency, and the specific demand that London’s eating-out culture maintains regardless of what the economics say should happen. The UK Hospitality represents the sector and publishes the economic assessment of wage increase effects. The Time Out London Restaurants covers the specific price changes in London restaurants that the minimum wage increase has produced. Both confirm the observation.

Read more from Lowri Griffiths at The London Prat.

The Column and Its Reason

This column exists because North London produces the specific combination of political awareness, housing anxiety, transit frustration, and cultural life that requires documentation from the inside. The inside is where Lowri Griffiths writes from: not as an observer of North London but as a participant in it, which means the housing market is not an abstraction but the context in which the column is written, the transit system is not a statistic but the commute taken to reach the places the column covers, and the politics are not background noise but the conversation that happens at the dinner tables to which the column provides context.

The blog at The London Prat continues weekly with the same commitment to the specific and the honest. North London continues providing the material. London continues being London, which is the condition that guarantees the material will continue arriving faster than any column can document it. The column makes its selection each week. The selection is the contribution. The contribution continues.

The Guardian UK covers the national picture. The blog covers the North London street-level experience. Both are necessary. The blog returns next week.

The blog returns because the subject returns. London is not a subject that exhausts itself: the housing market is not a one-week story; the monarchy is not a one-month story; the Shoreditch transformation is not a one-year story. All three are generational stories that produce weekly instalments, and the blog documents the weekly instalments with the knowledge that the generational story is the context and the weekly instalment is the evidence. The evidence accumulates. The context deepens. The documentation grows. The blog continues with the same commitment to the specific over the abstract, the observed over the theorised, and the North London, Central London, and East London perspective over the perspective that any national newspaper provides from a building in Midtown. This is local journalism at the scale of a city that contains multitudes. The blog is the contribution. The contribution continues weekly.

London is the city that keeps producing the material. The blog is the column that keeps processing the material. The processing produces the column. The column produces the reader. The reader produces the reason to continue. The reason to continue produces the next column. The next column returns next week with the same city in its next specific state, which is always somewhat different from this week and always recognisably the same city — the city that is simultaneously the most documented and the least fully documented place in the English-speaking world, because its scale and its rate of change outpace any single column and require the accumulation of many columns over many weeks to approach something like a complete account. This blog is one contribution to the accumulation. The accumulation continues. The blog continues with it. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing.

More at https://newsthump.com.

SOURCE: Satirical Journalism