Food has always been the great connector. Long before dining became transactional, it was communal. A way to gather, to celebrate, to debate, to linger. Today, as modern life accelerates and schedules fragment, the places we choose to eat are carrying more cultural weight than ever before. Dining out is no longer just about what’s on the plate; it’s about how we come together.

The way consumers eat and drink continues to evolve, shaped by a complex mix of cost pressures, changing lifestyles and a growing appetite for meaningful experiences. Time has become precious currency. When people step out, they’re making deliberate choices about where, and with whom, they spend it – and what it says about them. Increasingly, they’re seeking spaces that offer connection, flexibility and atmosphere, not rigid formats or one‑dimensional experiences.

This is where the rise of social‑led dining comes into focus. Today’s diners are prioritising shared moments over solitary ones, choosing venues that nurture interaction rather than hurry them along. They want spaces that feel alive. Places that invite conversation, spontaneity and discovery. Hospitality, at its best, is never just about efficiency; it’s about emotion.

Food halls are uniquely placed to answer this cultural shift. They are literally built for togetherness. By bringing multiple traders under one roof, they remove friction from group dining, empowering people to come together without compromise. Different tastes, budgets and moods can coexist easily, encouraging organic decision‑making. It offers the simple joy of wandering, sharing and choosing in the moment.

The informal layout of a food hall matters just as much as what’s being served. Long tables, open seating and a natural flow between spaces make conversation effortless. There’s no ticking clock, no sense of being ushered out for the next booking. Guests can settle in, linger and let the evening take its own shape. In a culture that’s increasingly structured and scheduled, that freedom has real value.

Crucially, food halls are about more than food. Eating becomes the anchor, not the endpoint. Live music, competitive socialising and entertainment create an environment where food and drink sit naturally alongside laughter, play and celebration. These are places where memories are made, not just meals consumed. In doing so, food halls echo something deeply human: the instinct to gather.

That instinct is proving remarkably resilient, even against the backdrop of a challenging hospitality landscape. The continued success of food halls has been widely documented, and demand shows no sign of slowing. At Market Halls, we saw sales uplift of 6.1% like-for-like against the Easter bank holiday last year, a clear signal that people are still seeking out these social spaces, especially during moments when connection matters most. However, I think this also speaks to the importance of the curation of the offer in these spaces. In these “spaces that can be anything”, you’ve got to bring a melting pot of options together cohesively, as well as curate the atmosphere and the energy. This is something we place high value on and is something that we deliver in shedloads when it comes to experience. You can’t just have great food and drink on offer. There is so much more to it. As operators, we have a responsibility not just to follow cultural trends, but to shape and add to them thoughtfully. At Market Halls, social‑led dining informs everything from our food offering to the traders we partner with, ensuring that each visit feels fresh and exciting. Our recent expansion into Brighton reflects growing confidence in the sector and increasing consumer demand for this style of hospitality across the UK.

But loyalty in hospitality is being redefined. It’s no longer enough to reward spend alone. People return to places that feel familiar, adaptable and woven into their routines. That’s why we continue to invest in experiences that extend visits beyond eating. At our Oxford Street site, guests can enjoy basketball arcade games, air hockey, darts, pool and shuffleboard, but all introduced carefully, so those seeking a quieter experience still feel at home.

We’re also seeing a growing appetite for event‑led engagement. Hospitality is increasingly becoming the backdrop to cultural moments, from live sport to shared celebrations. In response, we’re enhancing major sporting events such as the 2026 FIFA World Cup with tailored packages across all sites – combining food and drink tokens, big‑screen viewings and exclusive merchandise. These moments help reinforce food halls as places to gather, celebrate and belong.

Of course, rewarding loyalty still matters. Through Hall Pass, our loyalty app, guests can access a number of offers and redeem their earned points across all venues. Arguably a simple mechanic that values frequency, not just spend. It allows us to build a direct relationship with our guests, encouraging informal, repeat visits and helping social‑led dining become part of everyday life rather than an occasional treat.

So, what’s next for food halls? They are not a passing trend, but part of a wider cultural blueprint. Blending food, entertainment and community in a single, flexible space, their continued growth reflects how people already want to socialise. While the sector still faces pressure, adaptability will matter more than scale. Static concepts may struggle to keep up, but spaces that evolve alongside their communities will endure.

In a market where consumers are increasingly selective, social‑led dining captures both attention and loyalty. The future of dining isn’t defined by where people eat, but by where they choose to spend time together. Food halls understand that truth instinctively, and that’s why they’re shaping the cultural fabric of modern hospitality.

While most of the sector is focused on the “health span” of their customers or the “dynamic pricing” of their pints, our members have been signalling a different kind of crisis; the structural health of the marketing profession itself.

 

We recently ran our first Team Marketing Pulse; a salary and sentiment benchmark of 110 in-house and freelance marketers. The results aren’t just spicy; they are a direct challenge to every operator who thinks they can continue to scale their estate without scaling their support for the people driving footfall.

 

The most glaring trend we uncovered is what I’m calling the “20x Responsibility Trap”. In hospitality, we love to talk about scale. But for marketers, that scale is largely a one-way street. A marketer managing 100-plus sites earns a median salary of £76,500, which is a mere £26,000 more than someone managing just five sites.

 

Think about that maths: the responsibility scales 20 times, but the pay scales by a factor of only 1.5 times. We are asking our senior leaders to carry the weight of entire empires for a “scale premium”.

 

This structural plateau is creating a mass exodus toward the “exit door” of traditional employment. Our data shows a staggering “happiness gap” between those on the payroll and those on the loose:

● The flight risk: nearly one in two in-house marketers feel underpaid or are actively looking elsewhere.

● The manager malaise: senior managers are the highest flight risk, with one in five actively looking elsewhere.

● The freelance freedom: in contrast, only one in 14 freelancers feel underpaid.

 

Why the disparity? It isn't just about the money; it’s about the “bubble”. A significant portion of freelancers have now pivoted to work for SaaS and technology firms, balancing the pure hospitality vacuum for the premium day rates and clearer growth paths of the technology sector.

 

If you are an operator reading this, you need to ask a sharper question than “how do we increase dwell time?” You need to ask: “Are we building a workplace where our marketers can do their best work?” How to close the gap:

● Audit by scale: if your estate has doubled, your marketing lead’s salary and support team cannot remain static.

● Benchmark the capital: the London average for an in-house, head of marketing role is £65,500. If the team isn’t hitting this, you are officially below the community average.

● Support the support: marketing is high-pressure and often lonely. Encourage your teams to join peer-to-peer hubs like team marketing, where they can crowdsource solutions to the problems that keep them up at night.

 

We’ve spent years obsessing over customer lifetime value. It’s time we started obsessing over marketer lifetime value. Because if we don't, the best talent in our industry will continue to “escape the bubble” for greener, higher-paying pastures and won't look back.

So, farewell then Desmond Morris, who died last week aged 98 – presenter of ITV’s Zoo Time, author of The Naked Ape and a surrealist painter who also had something to say about pubs.

 

In 1993 he appeared, cradling a pint, on the cover of Pubwatching with Desmond Morris, though this amusing volume on how people behave in pubs was, in fact, written by social anthropologist Kate Fox. We can only presume that it was she who did the watching while Morris did the drinking. That book must have spun out of a project Fox was working on with Whitbread when I met her around 1990 at her office in Oxford where, along with Peter Marsh, she ran an organisation called MCM Research.

 

Its study, commissioned by the brewer, was based on interviews with 100 pub managers and published as a report titled Conflict and Violence in Pubs – now yours for free, thanks to the miracle of the internet.

 

It includes some quite shocking statistics on fights among customers and assaults on pub staff, and on the managers themselves, and goes on to suggest causes plus some solutions drawn from pubs where conflict was less of an issue or better managed.

 

Interestingly, a note on “alcohol and violence” towards the end of the report argues that “there is little evidence to support the idea that drink inevitably causes aggression”, flying in the face of an orthodoxy that assumes alcohol is the main problem.

 

Fox was to turn up 20 years later with a talk on BBC Radio 4, still arguing that we’d got it wrong about drink. “The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol,” she says in an accompanying article. 

 

Invoking the theory of “drunken comportment”, she declares that warnings about how drinking causes violence only trains people in that kind of drunken behaviour and makes it worse, when the experience of other societies suggest that the effects of drinking can be different, even the opposite.

 

I’m not sure you can diminish the role of alcohol in disorder entirely in that way, but the anthropological approach, in positioning drink amid the broad social context in which it is consumed, must surely produce valuable insights that advocates against alcohol often downplay. Fox was, of course, in the employ of drinks companies, which caused some bother I won’t go into. But that should not invalidate her contribution.

 

Anyway, MCM’s research was timely, if not ahead of its time. In the wake of the 1989 Beer Orders, investment flooded into urban centres where converting banks, famously, into huge bars was seen as part of a strategy to revitalise town and cities that had been hollowed out by shopping malls and developments on the outskirts. Ironically, the theory was that populating empty streets with drinkers would make them safer at night. 

 

A decade or so later, the resulting congregations of “superpubs” were blamed for “binge Britain”, and a moral panic around drunken disorder threatened the liberalising reforms of the 2003 Licensing Act.

 

A pubwatcher myself, I thought the problem here was not simply the alcohol but bad planning – too many very large bars were concentrated in too small an area – and the failure to properly manage such a potentially volatile situation.

 

I might have unconsciously learned the latter from Kate Fox et al, who had already warned that a high turnover of pub managers and a lack of training, along with factors such as the design of a venue, lay behind high levels of violence.

 

When you think about it, the speed and scale at which these places, usually open-plan “vertical drinking” establishments, were being opened through the 1990s must have put pressure on the ability of pubcos to staff them adequately and install management teams with the appropriate experience and skills. Conflict management was frequently delegated to door staff, who themselves at that time were largely unregulated and untrained.

 

It was all too easy for TV camera crews to turn up in a city centre at 11pm on a Saturday night and capture the wild scenes they needed to fuel the story of the moment.

 

We’ve learned a lot since, of course. But it was mostly there in MCM’s recommendations for Whitbread all that time ago. And places where they had been implemented they were, apparently, showing positive results. The trouble was that it was all forgotten in the scramble for the high street.

Over the last year, I’ve watched as the hospitality sector has been swept up in a wave of artificial intelligence (AI) hype. It’s a phenomenon that certainly isn't unique to our industry, but hospitality operators have been promised more than most. We were told AI would be the “silver bullet” for every challenge – unlocking efficiencies, driving down costs and even running kitchen equipment. For business leaders facing a decade of unending cost pressures, from dramatic wage increases to hikes in national insurance, that narrative was incredibly compelling.

 

On the ground, however, the reality has been far less clear-cut. I’ve seen too many tools that proved reactive rather than transformative, offering surface-level automation instead of the meaningful operational changes businesses expected. Many operators were essentially duped by “AI-washing” – dashboards that looked impressive but only told them what had already happened rather than what to anticipate next. In an industry defined by real-time decision-making, hindsight is never enough.

 

But today, I believe the conversation is shifting. We are entering a new phase of agentic AI adoption that can finally make good on technology's promise. I’m seeing a move toward AI tools that are no longer passive. They are becoming proactive, embedded and essential to how we run our businesses. At Harri, we are at the forefront of this shift with agentic AI built specifically for front-line hospitality managers. These agents don't just analyse data; they act on it in context.

 

In practice, this is transforming AI into a true workforce operating system. We’re seeing scheduling, compliance, labour optimisation and HR all connected in a unified way. Where perfecting a schedule used to take days of manual formulas, I can now see it done in a single click. It anticipates challenges and solves them instantly, improving speed and accuracy while reinforcing the accountability that scale-operators desperately need.

 

I anticipate a sharp correction in the market. Operators are becoming more sophisticated; they will soon purge “AI-washed”: tools that overpromise and underdeliver. As other cost pressures take hold, any tool that only provides vague claims without real-world proof of success will no longer justify its value.

 

Judging AI on tangible outcomes is a positive shift for our industry. We are moving beyond experimentation and into accountability. In the medium term, I see predictive systems evolving. The next generation of tools won’t just rely on historical data to tell us what to expect; they will be dynamic and forward-thinking, guiding decisions live as conditions change. Rather than reacting to a busy shift after it happens, we will have systems that act in the moment.

 

Longer term, I believe the most meaningful change will be in employee retention. While labour optimisation has traditionally been about cost, the future lies in balancing that efficiency with the employee experience. Our AI will help us identify disengagement, flag scheduling patterns that cause burnout and ensure equitable shift distribution. In an industry where retention is a persistent battle, using AI to create better environments is critical.

 

Ultimately, I believe we have moved past the hype and into a phase of tangible operational impact. AI is no longer just a “bolt-on” feature or a reporting layer; it is becoming embedded in the daily rhythm of running a restaurant.

 

The next phase won’t be defined by bigger promises, but by clearer outcomes. We are building systems that anticipate rather than react, and insights that lead directly to action. Agentic AI is finally in a position to deliver on the promises that hype alone could never keep.