The UK doesn’t “need more restaurants”, according to chancellor Rachel Reeves’s “entrepreneurship” adviser. She qualified the statement: “I’m not anti-hospitality but . . .” The UK treasury should be focusing on high-growth start-ups in tech and AI instead, she added. Well, it sounds pretty anti-hospitality to me.

I am not sure if you could find a better shorthand example for the soul of this Labour government: staid, technical, studied and stripped of soul, wit, warmth. This is all coming from a writer who rather likes Keir Starmer, by the way. So can you imagine how the restaurateurs of that country are speaking of him and Reeves? Chefs are famously fond of expletives.

I am reminded of this unhelpful and rhetorically graceless intervention from Reeves’s camp after hearing the sad news about Peploe’s on Dublin’s Stephen’s Green. Barry Canny, the owner and founder of this French bistro – which opened in 2003 – died in February. It is, by my measure, one of Dublin’s best restaurants. The food is good but not cheffy, while it is comfortable but not quaint and certainly never twee. It has a perfectly calibrated sense of occasion, with its white linen and professional but chatty waiters. If you have better liquidity than I, you can fast become a regular. This is a Goldilocks restaurant.

“Crisis” is a big word that should be reserved for very few occasions. So instead, I will say this: the Irish hospitality industry is in difficulty. In the first few months of 2025, 150 restaurants shut down. Gareth Smith closed his place, Big Mike’s in Blackrock, Co Dublin, a few months ago – explaining that the economic logic of running a restaurant no longer stood up. In last year’s Budget, the Government stuck to its promise – Vat on “food businesses” will be reduced from 13.5 per cent to 9 per cent in July. But January’s minimum-wage increase might just cancel out any savings set to be made, so says the industry at least. Meanwhile, we are spending more than ever on takeaway services.

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It takes a lot of confidence to be a restaurant like Peploe’s – consciously un-zeitgeisty, never knowingly on trend, interested in playing the hits and playing them well. Here you will eat white fish and roast potatoes and green salad. The chef seems to have never heard of kimchi and much less of yuzu. This restaurant could exist at any point in time between now back to 1995 and you wouldn’t notice any difference. There are a few analogues that come to mind: the Union Square Cafe or Balthazar in New York; the Wolseley in London. And forgive me for saying something obnoxious, but il Latini in Florence too. These restaurants are never going to change the world with their kitchens, but if you want to understand the shape of a city’s professional class, they are a pretty good bet for lunch.

And this is what offends me so much about Reeves’s adviser. We don’t “need” more restaurants? Yeah, duh. I would say that too if I were completely incurious about the world, uninterested in people and considered food less compelling than AI-led growth. Fortunately, I have a soul and a personality and therefore you will never hear me saying anything like that.

What is the point of turbo-charging national growth if it turns the UK – or Ireland, as the hospitality industry struggles, while GDP employers surge ahead – into a hyper-slick economy where everyone eats lunch at their desks while refraining from talking to each other? Where, exactly, are we supposed to gossip about our colleagues and complain about our friends and split a bottle of Chianti? The basement of the Google offices in Grand Canal Dock?

But here’s the thing that everyone gets wrong about restaurants – including their valiant defenders. “Food is not a frivolous, bourgeois pastime,” they say. “It is vital to community and society and culture and blah blah blah.” This is wrong, I am afraid. Food is a frivolous, bourgeois pastime and that is precisely why it matters so much.

I turn to the Spectator’s arts editor, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, in his own pages as he defends pointless endeavours like the National Portrait Gallery and Mozart: “The arts are by definition frivolous. That is their gift: they carve out a space for us in which the demand for utility – which weighs down on so much of the rest of our lives – is suspended.” Scallops, and Dublin Bay prawns, and blood oranges and sweet breads? Yes, all very useless in a world where protein shakes exist. And significantly more interesting because of that.

Not that I would expect the UK’s “we don’t need more restaurants” government to ever understand – as turgid and humourless as it is. I am glad about the Vat reduction here, it is at least evidence of a political class that cares. Places like Peploe’s are worth defending. And guess what, the bourgeois need pastimes too.

© The Irish Times