The notion of the word and usage of, sustainability, is one that I feel poses a few problems.
As things stand, we can’t really afford to simply sustain things, we really need to opt for a regenerative approach. This is very apt in the worlds of both food as a whole as well as for restaurants and food services.

2020 brought about the quickest changes in many, many things. Unprecedented, in fact.
COVID-19 saw to it that our skies were clearer, water was cleaner and food was deemed more precious than ever. For an industry that some would have argued was on its knees well before 2020, the London restaurant scene literally shut down overnight.

The domino effect was pretty speedy too: growers with harvests and crops -ready, were not able to hire the people needed to pick, process and pack produce. Breweries accumulated stocks of beer that became destined to be dumped, and many other fresh produce suppliers were forced to act quickly to either ‘pivot’ to service homes instead of restaurants or be left facing many unpaid bills.

Despite the challenges that Covid-19 has created, I would advocate that many positives have come out of It and hopefully there will be more to come.
One of the positives was the reconnection within neighbourhoods and between communities. People rallied together to support and help those in need both with practical things such as food, but also emotional needs in terms of the isolation and fear that some had to endure.

Collaboration and support became widespread. There has definitely been episodes of it before, but not to the extent we saw this time: people came out in force.
Innovation emerged strongly with completely new concepts being borne out of necessity, in many shapes and forms. Jobs poorly considered in the London restaurant scene, returned to be valued highlighting companies who had acted with empathy versus those that did not.

The lock-down period gave us all a chance to take a pause, something that – in the maniac pace at which restaurants needed to operate at – hadn’t been allowed for or had even been possible, in the past few years , this leaving little room for anything else apart from the operation of the restaurant itself.
I have personally been able to find time for both myself and for the restaurant.
I had the freedom of time to research and create, I thought about how to move forward, learn new skills and rediscover old ones.

So, what happens next?

There is no doubt that many businesses will not be able to survive. Not so much for their own fault, but rather they will fall victim to the overbearing landlords, excessive overheads and perhaps the change in the notion of the city centre, versus local neighborhoods.

Yet out of adversity there can be innovation, creation and above all, change.
I predict London will be awash with available restaurant locations, fully fitted out with little or no capital required to start up. This may well create opportunities for those who had no means to open their own place before the pandemic, hopefully creating a more diverse and democratic offer and operation.

My one concern is that there will be a lot of ‘waste’ that ends up in landfill though.
So, I hope there can be a way to repurpose, reuse and regenerate, thus providing greater opportunity to move forward.