Riding the storm: Ali Ross outside her pub
(Picture: Matt Writtle)There is a pub where one of the punters gives the landlord sweets most weeks and where the regulars sometimes wear t-shirts bearing its name. Given Londoners are sometimes unfairly earmarked as unfriendly sorts, it might sound like an idyllic country hideaway, but it’s actually the Greek Street Coach and Horses in Soho. “I think a lot of people just want a place where they can feel that they’re still a part of something,” says Ali Ross, searching to explain why so many of the same faces turn up week in, week out. She is interrupted as a local taps her shoulder hello.
Ross has managed the place since 2019 and like countless venues across town she is, after two years of it, facing another tumultuous time. As by now thoroughly documented, the hospitality industry is staring listlessly at bleak circumstances: supplier costs are up, consumer spending is tempered by the cost-of-living crisis — it being January doesn’t help — and rail strikes are doing more damage.
Trade body UKHospitality estimates the cost of the strikes at a ravaging £1.5 billion for December alone, a figure that is frightening if true. But elsewhere, and even if it likely won’t be felt for some months, the falling cost of gas is brightening news, and by-and-large Ross remains somewhat sanguine.
“Business wise, we’ve worked very steadily to be able to get to a point where it actually looks a lot more promising than even 2019,” she says, acknowledging the disruption of the pandemic.
“People have a healthy appetite to enjoy themselves and, you know, we all spent enough time at home [during lockdown]. And with everything at the moment, I think it’s great that we have places like pubs to be able to come into, to not have to think about it all, where you don’t sit watching the news 24/7.”
It’s a sense of hope that’s shared by others, even if qualified with an understandable sense of caution. “I still believe that pubs are incredibly resilient,” says Sam Pearman, the director of the Cubitt House group, which runs nine pubs across town including two that opened in the last nine months: Mayfair’s Barley Mow, and Notting Hill’s Princess Royal.
“But for the next three months at least, our outlook is very stagnant, and we’re not having much growth — at the moment we’re consolidating what we’ve got. I would still say I’m reasonably optimistic, and we’re in a good position; we can keep stable.”
Oisin Rogers, the landlord who consulted on the Audley, the hit London pub from ArtFarm — the same group that owns the Groucho — is convinced about the place pubs hold in Londoners’ lives. Given he’s set to open his own later this year, it’s perhaps just as well.
“Pubs are about being with other people, about community, communication, conversation, a sense of spending quality time in a wonderful place,” he says. “And while we’re retailers — because we need to make a profit at the end of the day — people come to pubs for completely intangible reasons.
“Look, when you leave after a couple of pints, you don’t have anything tangible with you. The purchase has already been consumed — and a lot of people might say that would be the beer or the scotch egg, the wine or whatever… but actually what we’re consuming is a feeling of happiness, or wonder, or comfort or joy. Or maybe you’ve come in to be grumpy. But I think going to the pub for me and for people of our ilk is as important as going to sleep, because it provides that intangible life benefit. It’s indescribable, but those of us who get it can’t really do without it.”
Rogers is not alone in trusting the market, either; the Three Compasses opened in Farringdon just before Christmas — its restaurant picking up five stars from the Standard’s critic Jimi Famurewa yesterday — and around the same time, the Landmark London hotel converted its bar into a pub, recognising their more egalitarian appeal.
Still, all three acknowledge the difficulties that lay ahead, aggravated by a disrupted Christmas. “The weather and the train strikes ruined Christmas for us,” sighs Pearman. “We knew it would have an effect but we didn’t know what it would be — [it was] pretty devastating to the Christmas excitement.” He adds: “That leads us into January, which is looking really, really bleak; that Christmas pick-up was what we needed heading into the first three months. And the other thing with the strikes is that we can’t yet forecast how to deal with them — you don’t know if people will come or not.” Fortunately, he says, Cubitt House has a solid events business arm that should “keep us limping through. I think we can ride the storm.”
It’s that sense of keeping on — evolving, changing, reassessing — that Rogers insists has always been critical in the business. “I can never remember a year in pubs that wasn’t tough; I can never remember a year when everyone went: ‘Oh, we’re all making hay, and there’s nothing to worry about!’” he says with a wry raise of the eyebrow. “But I think the biggest difference between where we are now and where we were before is that if you have to pay massively for energy and staff and produce and rent, and rates and all that, you’ve really got to do your sums — and if you haven’t got a cognitive, proper plan for where you’re going to be in three months’ time, you need to make one immediately, or you’re in the s***.” Costs remain the most pressing issue. “I’ve seen Guinness at £9, £10 in places,” Pearman says. “So we know we’re below market rate there. But food is more of a concern, as it’s very, very hard to put a decent plate of food on the table without putting a big price too.
“Our best-selling steak, the Flat Iron, has near enough doubled in 12 months. With chips, I think before it was around £19, and now it’s £31. But it’s everything — even the slice of lemon in a gin and tonic has gone up. It all needs to be factored in.”
Ross has a similar take: since she took over, the Coach has been a wet-led pub which, contrary to the prevailing narrative of the past two decades, she says is a benefit of sorts. “In one respect, we are very, very fortunate that we don’t have the overheads of the kitchen here,” she says.
And where once the Coach was a pure boozer — keeping to ales from its owner Fuller’s, commercial lagers and Guinness — she now offers an expanded, ever-changing line-up of craft drinks alongside them. It appeals to more people, she says, and to changing habits in the face of restaurants putting their prices up.
“We’ve spoken a lot to customers and some of them are making careful choices to go out with their £20, £30, and are thinking about just going out for a few drinks,” she says. “Rather than potentially going out for a meal.”
All three readily acknowledge that businesses elsewhere may face different circumstances and different problems, especially those further out of the centre of town who don’t have the same footfall. But ultimately, the future always depends on putting the customer first, Pearman says. Get that right and “we know people will be back. And when they are, it will be in big numbers.”
“Those who are successful are dependant entirely on happy guests coming back and enjoying what you do,” adds Rogers. “There’s an old adage that a landlord said to me in the Nineties: busy pubs get busier and quiet ones get quieter. And I think that there’s an element of truth to that because busy pubs don’t get busy by themselves. It’s about customers buying into your story.”
Ross agrees. “I think what we focused on over this past year, especially with increasing of pricing — and people sort of being a bit more conscious about their spending — is just to really focus on people’s experience within the pub, and that both customer and staff wise, everyone’s happy.”
Pubs, then, might be struggling — but those who make it through seem set to only come out of it stronger.
