5 July 2024

Dining out has become a card melter: Can Canberra's food culture survive?

| Ian Bushnell
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woman complaining about an expensive restaurant bill

Is the middle class being priced out of a nice dinner out with the family? Photo: Pheelings Media.

Have you had a look at restaurant menus lately?

A couple of outings lately necessitated a hunt for lunch spots. I quickly discovered that without taking out a second mortgage, some of these menus were for Canberrans who lived on more rarified budgets than mine.

The cost-of-living crunch is a great appetite suppressant when you’re scanning through a menu looking for main under $40 and finding anything with red meat doesn’t get you much change out of a $100.

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Lamb used to be the national dish – just ask Sam Kekovich on Australia Day – but that once staple has slipped off most menus.

Where is all that lamb going? Probably not the family table on a Sunday if restaurants can’t even afford it.

Anything that resembles a steak starts with a six.

Even if you’re vegetarian, putting together a satisfying meal could melt the plastic.

Couples and families used to be able to splash out for a special occasion and not have to resort to peanut butter sandwiches for the rest of the week.

Now that romantic dinner won’t have you out of there for less than a couple of hundred. And that doesn’t include the wine.

Those days of panic-free dining now seem like some nostalgic memory.

Restaurants are cutting corners, trimming servings and reshaping menus to cover their rising costs, but the result could be a death spiral unless they rely on the interest rate-immune or Canberra’s high flyers.

If people are like me, the hoi polloi can now be found in the small cafes serving up $5 caffeine fixes, the local Indian or Chinese takeaway or having a feed with a clown (are they really “lovin’ it”?)

The Canberra region has developed an enviable reputation in recent years for a food and wine offering that was generally accessible, but rising inflation and incomes unable to keep pace are now eating into that hard-earned foodie culture.

The hospitality industry is battling as Canberrans curtail their discretionary spending. Restaurant failures have become so common that news outlets have stopped reporting on all but the most notable ones.

It’s not their fault. Margins in this sector have always been tight and often alcohol sales have subsidised menus. However, fewer people are drinking wine or beer, so that is also hitting their bottom lines.

Chefs are trying to source affordable ingredients without compromising quality and are becoming more inventive to cut costs, but I wonder how they’ll survive.

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Perhaps we have had it good for so long that we forget that, at least for my working-class family, dining out was once rare.

But there were a lot fewer quality restaurants.

Is this the great resetting where anything like fine dining will be, for most, an exceptional event? Because without incomes recovering the bang for their buck or interest rate falls restoring some heft to the mortgage belt, how can people justify the expense?

I fear there is going to be a lot more pain to come in the hospitality industry.

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HiddenDragon8:37 pm 06 Jul 24

The national/international squeeze on discretionary spending and the rise in the costs of many inputs is made all the worse for local businesses thanks to the relative ease with which staff can get more money for less work and real responsibility in the public sector and the tendency of Canberra landlords to ask big city rents for premises which offer provincial levels of passing trade and ambience.

In fairness (up to a point) Canberra landlords might, in turn, point to the levels of property taxes they pay compared to what is charged in other jurisdictions, with the claimed benefit of Barr’s property tax changes (reduction/elimination of transfer duties in return for higher annual charges) often illusory in a market where many commercial properties are, as the cliche goes, “tightly held”.

Yes, it is getting harder and harder to find a good value food within the ACT borders. A few favourites are hanging in there offering good food for good prices, but even the clubs are charging beyond fair value prices. My favourite value feed is the Masala Hut special in Weston Creek – even better value when you can get a window seat and watch the really bad parking on Brierly St.
The Harrison Thai also gets a nod. Otherwise, my own kitchen it is!

Robert Woodrow9:42 am 06 Jul 24

Having grown up in a working class family in the country we NEVER ate out. But now, in retirement, I enjoy breakfast at my favourite cafes a couple of times a week.
I’ve experienced 24% interest rates during “the recession we had to have” so I empathise with the poor buggers who are doing the heavy lifting and trimming their budgets in a futile effort to beat inflation.
The game changer might be when Michelle Bullock’s favourite restaurant goes into receivership.
Perhaps then the “penny will drop”

Gregg Heldon8:30 am 06 Jul 24

You can still go to your local club and get a decent steak for a number with a high 2 or low 3 on the price. Or a schnitty with a 2.
Restaurants are for special occasions and, in my opinion, don’t always offer better food than what you get at the local club anyway.

It’s club land food though. Your medium steak might be under done or burnt. They now charge top price so food should be as ordered. I reported our local club (Gungahlin) for selling 300gram steaks that weighed less than 150grams cooked (yes I bought my scales to the club) to the ACT government and now everyone benefits from my initiative and they provide food as advertised. If they could cook as ordered would be great,

Andrew Denny7:33 pm 06 Jul 24

True Gregg, however Calwell just updated its menu and schnittys are $29, so just barely with a 2, and garlic bread is $9. We are done eating out at the Club until the RBA moves beyond its one dimensional treatment of the inflation challenge, taking more out of my pocket and it giving it to the banks

GrumpyGrandpa6:41 pm 05 Jul 24

My wife was invited out for lunch with some friends recently. Hmmm. It was going to cost her $25, on top of which you know there’d be a drink and maybe someone would suggest they have some dessert etc.

This was just a catch-up. Not a special occasion. The Mrs decided a peanut butter sandwich, at home, was a better option. The money she saved could go towards ACTEWAGL’s 12.5% increase in electricity prices effectively 1 July 2024.

The upside here is that she really enjoys a peanut butter sandwich. 😊

It’s not fun being poor.

GrumpyGrandpa6:42 pm 07 Jul 24

Canberra, despite it’s higher than average incomes, has a large belly of people living on incomes well under that artificial “average” income.

Sadly, governments always seem to be focused on the “average”.

Personally we are ok. We have always been frugal, so that helps.

For many people, life is tough in a high income town.

Yep, there is a lot of assumption that everyone has the wage of an EL2, politician or diplomat. Tradies charge as though this is the case!

I like an affordable meal out as much as the next person, but if I were running a business and there were people out there with too much money that needed parting from them I’d be charging exorbitant prices too.

Whatever the market will bear.

This city has too many over-paid fat cats. I guess the rest of us have to find products and services that haven’t caught their eyes.

Capital Retro2:00 pm 05 Jul 24

I was quoted $8.00 for an epicurean potato scallop with gravy in a bread roll at my favourite takeaway last week. I had to decline.
I guess things will turn around now that Albo has thrown all those tax cuts at those who pay income tax.

The author and Canberra restaurants need to adapt to a return to what dinning was like 15 to 20 years ago. Going out for dinner was limited to special occasions and good restaurants were few in Canberra and expensive.

We have come out an extended period where many ‘restaurants’ serving Cafe quality food charged nearly as much the few high quality restaurants and many patrons accepted the overpriced dinning.

Restaurants have always been a high risk business with many failures and often only a life of a few years. Now with people having to adjust to the new normal of interest rates around the long term average, restaurants are one of the many businesses that are going to feel some pain. But, while interest rates may fall in the next year or two, consumers and businesses should expect that we will get no where near the historic lows of recent years.

I recently went to an expensive restaurant and it was booked out, so it is not outside the reach of a lot of people.

Every month there seems to be a newly built high rise apartment with a new restaurant and also a cafe on the ground floor.

Plenty of these apartment based restaurants have a short shelf life and are basically dead places a few months after their popular initial opening period. Founders Lane or the places opposite Bunnings Tuggeranong are but two examples. Belco and even Mort st Braddon has a few too.

How about our planning department put a bit more thought into restaurant zoning around new builds and stop restaurant businesses cannibalising each other .

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