As any new parent will tell you, teaching kids to feed themselves is not the issue. It’s more about teaching the little nippers what not to put in their mouth to keep the visits to A&E to a manageable level. It’s more of the same for puppy owners, with the additional cost of replacement socks.

So, it was something of a surprise to hear at this month’s Propel Multi-Club Conference how sector operator-turned-investor Robin Rowland, operating partner at TriSpan, tell attendees that “we need to teach the younger generation to eat out”. It seems that we – or they – have fallen out of the habit, or maybe not moved on from picking things out of the kitchen bin, or from the dog’s bowl. One assumes it’s not going to be a hard skill to learn, and we watch their progress with interest.

 

The trickier area identified at the event was encouraging investors to tuck in. There was much talk about where we were as a sector. When the good times would start to roll. Investors are very example driven. If one does it, they are all inclined to do it. Later in the cycle, it can be closer to lemmings, but let’s get to the good part first. Rowland was convinced that eating out would become “habitual” next year, with confidence also coming back for operators.

Steve Holmes, chief executive of the Azzurri Group, was thinking the good thoughts about the year after, commenting: “After every downturn you usually see a boost, and we haven’t seen that yet. If we have the mother of all recessions, we should then have the mother of all recoveries. In 2026, maybe?”

 

There was still caution in the market. People want to go out – they do – but they are husbanding their cash. This, CGA by NIQ’s Karl Chessell said, was leading to quality over quantity. Gone are the days of picking a two-litre bottle of Strongbow as your theme for the evening – 43% of consumers would rather have two high quality drinks, against 26% favouring three medium quality drinks and, perhaps because of this, people were going to bed earlier.

Maybe the consumer, having learnt how to eat out, needs to learn how to stay out. Sticking with the children/puppy learnings, distractions are key, and there was much chat around the ongoing draw of competitive socialising, which came with additional lures for those interested in sector transactions. It was, CMS’ David Roberts said, untested in the deals market, given that no-one had punted on one yet.

 

Roberts was less confident about other parts of the market, commenting that covid-19 had “provided a stay of execution for many businesses”. He added: “The natural, Darwinian process was artificially stayed, but Darwin is always right, and natural selection is back with a vengeance.” He identified four types of company – distressed, static, newbies and winners –  and it was only the latter two which were worth involving yourselves with.

For Roberts, “with the UK election out of the way and the capital gains tax uncertainty out of the way, interest rates will come down and the UK banks will want exposure to leisure businesses again and transitional activity will return”. There would, however, be an increased cost of funding against the last time the fair came to town, so you might find your coveted ten times Ebitda valuation was closer to 7.5 or 8. One area he did see interest in was static groups such as Cote – too big to fail, too big to grow – starting to acquire other brands and become platforms. And by creating those larger organisations, does one attract the high private equity fish?

 

Back with Rowland, who saw himself as a smaller private equity fish, he identified the cost of debt as “the other piece of the jigsaw that is yet to be resolved”. He said: “The traditional banks are coming back – the tide just comes and goes with debt. Once the credit committee has got its head around businesses, they are prepared to lend again.” For anyone looking to hook Rowland, he said: “Private equity works as money in and money out. It would love to get from A to B as fast as possible, but you won’t get the money if you go too fast. 

If it’s not aggressive enough, we say ‘we don’t think we can work with you’, and if it’s too aggressive, we pull back. We want to see a pipeline. We want to see sustainable like-for-likes. A business with heritage, quality and international aspirations is nirvana. I won’t invest in a business I don’t understand, I want to smell it and feel it.” And with that recipe, time to get a worm on the rod and see what you can attract.

During my early teenage years, my mother and I used to venture down from Yorkshire to London for regular lunches at some of the city’s smarter restaurants, which used to perplex my mates who couldn’t understand my unusual interest in eating at boring old, linen-table clothed restaurants.

 

They thought I was odd, but my argument was that they would eventually recognise the delights of eating top-notch food in comfortable surroundings while receiving extremely personal service. I’d simply chosen to do it at a younger age, which sensibly gave me more years to partake in one of life’s greatest pleasures.

 

I’m hoping my hypothesis came true and that they are all now middle-aged gourmands regularly perching their elbows on thick linen table cloths. But I’m not sure whether this scenario would play out today – even with my own children, who are well versed in smart venues – because there is a growing disconnect between the rich face-to-face personal service in many of the better restaurants and the preferences of younger diners today, who very much prefer the human-light touch.  

 

This could potentially pose an existential threat to many restaurants – from the mid-stream operators through to those at the high-end – that don’t adapt their propositions and embrace more technology to satisfy the younger audience.

 

However, it would appear that these establishments are increasingly making gradual changes around the edges of their offerings, judging by the number of high-profile critics who have recently bemoaned the way a growing number of restaurants are losing their human touch. This is the primary characteristic that ultimately makes them worth visiting, they all argue.

 

In their parting shots to their regular restaurant review readership, Marina O’Loughlin and Pete Wells, formerly of The Sunday Times and The New York Times respectively, penned their final columns, highlighting how technology now meant that a growing part of the 

experience of dining out no longer involved actual people. It’s all been de-humanised – from booking online as there are no phone lines anymore to using QR codes for viewing menus, using apps for paying via mobile devices and leaving feedback online rather than actually telling the server face-to-face.

 

Wells states: “I thought of restaurants as one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human [but there have been] a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants.”

 

Tim Hayward, in the Financial Times, has also riffed on this very issue recently and has linked the demise of personal service to the dire situation of recruiting people from outside the UK. But that’s another story. Meanwhile, in Country Life, Tom Parker Bowles extolled the virtues of the restaurant proprietor, now an increasingly rare breed, who is the face of the restaurant and is present on the premises every service, welcoming guests across the threshold.

 

I agree with the sentiment of all these respected individuals in hospitality but there is one underlying problem. None of them are youngsters – including, sadly, myself. We all have exactly the same opinion, it seems, about the beauty of having personal interactions throughout the dining experience. 

 

But this is very much misplaced today. Youngsters simply don’t want it. They actively want the opposite, in fact. This has been apparent in the quick service restaurant category, where kiosks, drive-thru and digital ordering now reigns supreme – but it is also spreading up the food chain.

 

Casual dining chain Bill’s is now rolling out self-service kiosks and QR codes, having found that more than 50% of its customers now pay digitally at its London sites. Tom James, MD of Bill’s, says: “It’s definitely a way that a big portion of the market would like to go out and eat. It goes against hospitality and, as a sort of old-school hospitality veteran, it’s different. But we have to adapt.”

 

Will Beckett, co-founder of Hawksmoor, is a very smart operator who recognises the problem and is working hard at balancing a move towards delivering a faster and more convenient service for [no doubt younger] customers while also retaining the human touch and hospitality in his smart restaurants.

 

This high wire act of retaining personal interactions while integrating impersonal technology into the mix is undoubtedly a major challenge facing restaurants across the land. The moves some are already making have clearly riled experienced reviewers and commentators who, like myself, have luxuriated in the old ways of dealing with actual people when eating out. 

 

But that’s not the future. It’s instead over to the likes of my pair of youngsters, who will be increasingly determining the future of service. Hopefully they will be following family tradition and taking me along with them to some smart restaurants. And also, most importantly, dealing with the digital payments bit.

In Shakespeare’s great study of old age, power and a changing world order, King Lear has retired, given away his kingdom and thrown himself on the charity of his bad daughters, Goneril and Regan, who haggle over how little they can get away with giving him, eventually leaving him with nothing. “O, reason not the need!” wails Lear at this harsh example of means testing. The early women’s suffrage movement in the United States put it another way: “Give us bread, but give us roses, too”, a slogan since taken up by many others struggling for just rewards.

 

Hospitality is in the roses game. It might sell bread, but it’s the roses that people come for – the special pleasure of eating out, being looked after, the excess over the pure need for nutrition. Lear is arguing that human needs cannot be measured in mere survival. Hospitality is essential to dignity, to civilisation. And now we have a new government taking away winter fuel payments from all but the most deprived of Britain’s near 13 million pensioners who, apart from anything else, constitute a hugely important market for the hospitality sector.

 

They say the country can’t afford it. But it’s only politically possible for a government to take money away from pensioners because, for some years, there’s been a grumble rumbling around that older people have got it too good. A caller to Nicky Campbell’s phone-in on BBC 5 Live, supporting the axe on winter fuel payments, summed up the attitude: “Go down any garden centre and you can see pensioners lunching out,” he said.

 

He is obviously not a pub-goer, or he would have seen these “spongers” there too, keeping trade ticking along through the quieter daytimes in the week, and possibly even splashing out tax-payers’ cash on an alcoholic beverage. The scandal of it. And they don’t care. “The money is just for the holiday kitty,” one 80-year-old brazenly admitted to the BBC. “I could also use it to go out for a nice meal.”

 

Then there’s Mick Jagger. In these debates, the Rolling Stones frontman is invariably invoked to represent the undeserving pensioner. I bet he’s straight down the garden centre when his 300 quid comes in, tucking into a bowl of soup and a slice of quiche, and probably waltzing out with a petunia seedling for his window box, to boot.

 

To be honest, I don’t really know what Mr Jagger does with his winter fuel payment. But I would venture that he isn’t a typical pensioner. Not in those trousers, anyway. There are certainly those who don’t “need” the extra cash in the sense that they probably won’t have to choose between food and fuel this winter, but that doesn’t make them rich.

 

Almond Financial’s 2024 Pensions Breakeven Index, which takes account of varying costs of living (including a meal out once a month but not rent), shows that UK pensioners sit mid-table among European nations, just above breakeven and below the likes of Bulgaria, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Ukraine. In Luxemburg, which tops the list, the maximum monthly state pension is £5,200, compared with £960 in Britain.

 

Nor is the average pensioner’s situation improving. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, relative pensioner poverty has been on the increase since austerity began to bite in 2011, and they have also been more exposed to the soaring price of food and fuel in recent years. Much of the assertion that pensioners are well off rests on the idea that they’ve paid off their mortgage, but the FT notes that’s less true than it was, and those that have are expected to fall from 78% of pensioners to 63% by 2041.

 

This is worrying for garden centres, and for many pubs, too. Not to mention the older pub-goer for whom a trip to the local is vital to their well-being. Studies have demonstrated the importance of pubs in easing the loneliness felt by single pensioners especially, and if they can afford to sit among company in the warmth of a bar for a couple of hours, it offsets their own fuel costs, of course. It’s called sharing.

 

But my main point is that society’s compassion must go beyond ensuring that our older citizens – for whom pensions are, after all, deferred wages for the work they’ve already done – are spared Lear’s blasted heath. They should be spared having to sit in front of the blasted telly all day long too, because they’re too skint to go out to the pub.