UK's leading restaurants nudge back into the black

By James Lawrence

Published: 09 January, 2023

Research unveiled by accountancy group UHY Hacker Young shows that the UK's top 100 restaurants returned to profitability in 2022, after four years of consecutive losses.

“The UK’s top 100 restaurant businesses have finally returned to profit, making £19.9m of profit in the last year, up from a loss of £673m a year ago,” said a representative from Hacker Young.

However, they emphasised that the figure represented a profit margin of less than 0.5% on a turnover of £5.2billion, warning that these modest gains could be swallowed up by the cost of living crisis.

Peter Kubik, partner at UHY Hacker Young, explained that this return to profitability in the restaurant sector followed a campaign of major restructuring amongst restaurant groups that had over expanded and then been hit hard by Covid.

Many of those restructuring programmes, which incurred substantial write-downs, have now come to an end.

“The UK’s top restaurant chains finally posting a profit, however small, is a welcome surprise. The industry has done a good job in trimming costs and getting back on the path to profitability but it's now facing a new challenge having to deal with increasing inflation and rising interest rates,” Kubik said.

He added: “It would be wrong to assume that the restaurant sector is now out of the danger zone. The many headwinds the sector is facing means they will still face further challenges.”

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