Ever wonder how some tables just seem to make your week, whilst other tables just seem to make your week worse?

On the 26th November 2025, the Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered her budget to the House of Commons. Here's our take on what that means for Hospitality.

The truth is, if you’re opening a restaurant to get rich, you’re probably doing it for the wrong reason.

From the outside, hospitality looks like the most social industry in the world- busy rooms, constant chatter, people everywhere. But for the owners, it’s often one of the loneliest jobs you can have.

What happens when the minimum wage keeps rising faster than everything else? On paper, it looks like progress - higher wages for the lowest paid, more money in people’s pockets. But for hospitality, it brings a different kind of challenge: who gets hired, who gets left out, and how sustainable is it when the bottom rises faster than the middle.

What happens when the minimum wage keeps rising faster than everything else? On paper, it looks like progress - higher wages for the lowest paid, more money in people’s pockets. But for hospitality, it brings a different kind of challenge: who gets hired, who gets left out, and how sustainable is it when the bottom rises faster than the middle.

We know that experiences are important in hospitality – but too often we wind up treating our staff very differently.

Experiences alone aren't enough anymore - we can't just leave our customers with great memories - we have to help them leave differently from how they arrived.

Hospitality lives and dies by the experiences that we create for others. Your guests won’t always remember what the bill came to, or what they ate and drank. But they will always remember how they felt that night, and more importantly, how you made them feel.

When VAT jumped from 17.5% to 20% in 2011, operators felt it overnight. Could it happen again? What a VAT increase would mean for hospitality in the UK

I genuinely believe that you can’t spend time focusing on your business if you’re spending all your time working in it. However, all these people singing from the same hymn sheet (me included) never speak about the very real reasons for needing to systematically remove yourself from the day-to-day running of the business.

Maybe you’ve heard the owner or General Manager saying that the business isn’t hitting the GP target, or maybe you are a GM or business owner and you’re tired of saying it. Sounds like a broken record, doesn’t it? But food wastage, comps & portion controls in restaurants have a direct impact on stock costs.

We have very little to celebrate in the hospitality industry at the moment, so it’s a good idea to take (and celebrate) every win that we can. When we do, we need to ensure that we’re celebrating the right things and for the right reasons - but - inflation doesn't equal growth.

Most owners we speak to have a rough idea of their GP - though usually not what it’s running at today, just what it was targeted to be back when the menu was built. Fewer still know their labour percentage from last week. And almost no one can say that their team members know these figures - let alone understand them.

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