Inside the real costs squeezing gastropubs and diners alike
I did the maths on a Sunday brunch this week, purely out of morbid curiosity, and arrived at a figure that made me put my phone down and stare into the middle distance for a moment. Two eggs, one avocado, a small amount of feta, and a coffee: nineteen pounds. Not in some absurd concept restaurant designed to go viral. In a perfectly ordinary gastropub, the kind that’s existed on this corner for years, quietly raising its prices in increments small enough that you don’t notice until you add it all up in one horrified sitting.
This is, I’m aware, the most tediously London complaint imaginable, roughly adjacent to grumbling about the weather or the Central line. But I think the brunch price spiral is actually a useful, if faintly ridiculous, window into a bigger story about what’s happened to hospitality economics in this city over the past few years.
Where the Money Is Actually Going
I asked the owner of a small, well-regarded café near me to walk me through her own numbers, and she was refreshingly candid about it. Energy costs alone have roughly doubled since before the pandemic. Wholesale food prices, particularly for the specific ingredients that make a brunch menu look like a brunch menu rather than simply a fry-up, have climbed steadily. And staffing costs have risen too, partly through minimum wage increases she genuinely supports, and partly through the sheer difficulty of retaining kitchen staff in a city where their own rent has climbed just as sharply as her energy bill.
“People see the nineteen pounds and think I’m profiteering,” she told me. “My actual margin on that plate is smaller than it was five years ago when I charged twelve. I’m not trying to get rich off your eggs. I’m trying to keep the lights on while paying people properly.”
The Bit Where I Try to Be Fair to Everyone
It would be easy, and satisfying in a shallow way, to write this as a simple story of greedy hospitality businesses fleecing loyal customers. It’s not that simple, and I don’t think it’s honest to pretend otherwise. Most of the small, independent places I’ve spoken to are operating on margins thin enough that a single bad month could genuinely threaten the business, brunch prices notwithstanding.
That said, there’s a separate, less sympathetic story happening at the more corporate end of the market, where brunch has become a deliberately engineered “experience” product, complete with bottomless prosecco upsells and Instagram-optimised plating, priced less according to actual input costs and more according to what a very specific demographic of London brunchers has proven willing to pay without blinking. Those two stories get conflated constantly, and I think that conflation does a genuine disservice to the small operators actually struggling with real cost pressures.
What This Actually Changes About How People Eat
Anecdotally, and I want to stress this is genuinely anecdotal rather than rigorous data, I’m noticing more friends suggesting a walk in the park with a flask of coffee instead of the once-automatic Sunday brunch booking. Whether that’s a meaningful shift in London social habits or just my own increasingly frugal friend group, I genuinely can’t say. But if brunch prices keep climbing at their current pace, I suspect the ritual itself, not just individual restaurants, starts to look different within a few years.
One hospitality industry analyst I spoke with suggested the sector is already quietly bifurcating, expensive, elevated brunch experiences at one end, and a resurgence of cheaper, no-frills caffs at the other, with the comfortable middle ground, the nice-but-not-fancy gastropub brunch I grew up associating with a lazy Sunday, being squeezed hardest by rising costs on all sides.
Where I’ve Landed, Slightly Poorer Than I Started
I don’t have a tidy conclusion here beyond genuine sympathy for small operators caught in a cost spiral not remotely of their own making, alongside continued mild resentment toward the specific corner of the industry treating scrambled eggs as a luxury lifestyle product. Both things can be true simultaneously, and I think most Londoners quietly hold both opinions at once, somewhere between the till and the first bite.
Bohiney Magazine has tracked similar brunch inflation stories in other major cities, which offers the small comfort that this particular indignity, at least, isn’t unique to us.
You can find more from me at my author page, generally written on a considerably cheaper breakfast budget than the one described above.
For further reading, see coverage from Time Out London and CityAM.
A Small Confession
I want to be honest that I still went back to that same gastropub the following weekend, nineteen pounds and all, because the coffee is genuinely excellent and the owner remembers my name, which counts for something in a city that can otherwise feel determined to keep everyone anonymous. I mentioned the price to her again, slightly sheepishly, and she laughed and told me she’d take the complaint over the alternative, which is nobody coming in at all. “At least you’re still here to grumble about it,” she said, which felt like the most honest summary of London hospitality economics I’ve heard all year.
I don’t know how long that balance holds, for her or for the dozens of similar places across this city trying to thread the same needle between fair prices and a business that actually survives the year. But I’ll keep going back, grumbling quietly into my very expensive eggs, for as long as places like hers manage to hang on.
