MyShout

Michael Bell feels that it is time to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to food-led pubs

Q. When is a pub not a pub?

A. When its food sales exceed roughly 60%.

Restaurant bills will generally be 65% food, 35% wet. Once a pub's food trade nudges this critical 65%, it will have lost its bar trade. If this is the case, it can then no longer call itself a pub, but instead becomes a restaurant. In the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, restaurants were mainly Chinese, Indian, French or Italian and were universally located in towns or in

rural hotels.

The first food-led pubs, where all food was freshly prepared, appeared in the 1960s and 1970s in the countryside, where the only licensed premises available in which to open restaurants, were pubs. By and large these places retained their bar trade, but as their food became more popular, many, either through accident or on purpose, squeezed out their locals.

It is universally agreed that "gastropub" is an unfortunate word with medical connotations and, speaking as the founder in 1985 of one of London's very first "food-led" pubs, I feel the time has now come to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Despite valiant efforts to match beers with food, restaurants (unless they have an appalling wine list) generally sell very little real ale with meals and, as a consequence, if most of the custom is from diners, are forced to drop this short-shelf-life commodity.

Keeping a food-led pub's bar trade is a holy grail that should be recognised for what it is - a pub, pure and simple. Any self-respecting (country) pub that does

not have a dog-and-wellie attitude has "sold-out", in

my book.

Pubs whose food has become so successful that they have no bar trade, should, therefore, not be eligible to enter in any pub awards, they should be fighting their corner in the restaurant sector. Running a pub is a vocation and for pubs to be successful in the coming years, diversity will be the name of the game.

Many years ago I asked a leading trade architect what delineates a bar area from a restaurant area. His answer was "when tables are closer than six feet from the bar".

There will be odd exceptions. One "pub of the year" favourite of mine, doing over £20k a week as an excellent restaurant, never ever had a bar and still taps its beer straight out of the cellar. Every time I go there I seem to be the only person drinking real ale but sheer volume of trade probably keeps the ale ticking over - and he has a dog-and-wellie attitude, so he qualifies!

With every celeb chef now taking on a pub, the time has come to separate the true pubs from the restaurants.