UK Fine-Dining Restaurants Cut Lobster and Steak as Food Costs Surge

Britain's top restaurants are removing premium dishes such as lobster, turbot and steak from menus as soaring ingredient costs make traditional fine dining financially unviable, Michelin-starred chefs and leading restaurateurs said. Tommy Banks, the Michelin-starred Yorkshire chef behind the Black Swan at Oldstead and Roots in York, said his restaurants stopped routinely serving turbot after its price rose from £14.50 a kilo in 2018 to £65 a kilo last week. "There's a lot of ingredients we simply don't use because they're too expensive, and we can't pass that cost on," he said. Sam Harrison, who runs Sam's Riverside in Hammersmith, west London, removed his popular native lobster roll after crustacean prices rocketed, and is shifting toward cheaper British fish including mackerel, sardines, pollock and gurnard. James Robson, whose group operates Fallow, Roe and the Oxo Tower, said some suppliers were raising prices by up to 40pc, driven by energy and transport bills. Official figures show restaurant and hotel prices rose 3.8pc in the year to September, while supermarket food and drink inflation slowed to 1.3pc.