A proposed exemption for modest places that close by midnight is a neat idea with one obvious weakness, which is that a restaurant can stop being one
Small Restaurants and Late Bars: Hackney’s Fifty-Cover Exemption Explained
Here is a puzzle for anyone who thinks about how a neighbourhood works after dark. You want more places where people can have dinner. You do not want more places where people drink until three. On paper these are different businesses. In practice, in Shoreditch, the first has a way of turning into the second.
Hackney’s licensing committee has been looking at exactly this.
The Proposal
When councillors met in February last year to consider reintroducing a cumulative impact policy for Shoreditch, the papers included a carve-out. According to a summary of the meeting, one proposal would have left small restaurants out of the Shoreditch assessment, provided they seat fifty or fewer and shut by eleven in the week and midnight at weekends.
The effect would be this. In the designated area, an application for a new late bar or club would face a presumption of refusal. An application for a small restaurant with reasonable hours would not. It would be judged in the ordinary way.
Why It Makes Sense
The thinking is sound. The problems residents report, noise, disorder, people on the street at closing time, are associated with alcohol-led venues open into the early hours. A forty-seat restaurant that stops serving at eleven does not produce a crowd on the pavement at 2am.
Small restaurants are also what a mixed neighbourhood wants. They bring people out in the evening without the excess. They employ locals. They give a street life at eight o’clock, not only at midnight.
An earlier study commissioned by the council drew the same distinction. Its audit of the evening and night-time economy counted late-opening premises in and around Shoreditch by type: nightclubs, late-night bars, late-night restaurants, and noted a category of premises serving beers and cocktails into the late-night period with no, or minimal, food provision beyond eleven. Those it classed as late-night bars regardless of what they called themselves.
The Weakness
The same meeting summary records the obvious objection. Some respondents to the consultation highlighted how easily small restaurants might convert into late-night bars.
This is not a theoretical concern. A premises opens as a restaurant. It has tables, a menu, a chef. After a year or so, the kitchen closes earlier. The tables are pushed back. There is a DJ on Fridays. An application goes in to vary the hours. Before long it is a bar that serves small plates until nine.
Nobody set out to deceive. The economics pushed that way. Drink is more profitable than food.
How to Hold the Line
The remedy is in the conditions attached to a licence. A council can require that alcohol be sold only to people seated and taking a meal. It can cap the number of covers. It can require the kitchen to stay open as long as the bar. It can specify that there is no vertical drinking.
These are enforceable, in principle. The difficulty is resources. Checking whether a venue is abiding by its conditions on a Saturday night requires officers out on a Saturday night. Licensing teams are small.
The second safeguard is the variation process. If a restaurant that benefited from the exemption later applies for longer hours or to remove a food condition, that application would fall back under the cumulative impact policy. In theory the door that was open for a restaurant is shut for a bar.
Fifty Covers
Why fifty? It is a line that has to be drawn somewhere. A fifty-seat room is a neighbourhood restaurant. A two-hundred-seat room is an operation that may well have a large bar attached. The number keeps the exemption to the small independents the policy wants to encourage.
Critics might say it is arbitrary and that a well-run eighty-seat restaurant is no more of a nuisance than a fifty-seat one. They would be right. All thresholds are arbitrary at the margin.
What It Says About the Council’s Thinking
I read the proposal as a sign of a more grown-up approach to licensing than the blunt instruments of the past. The old Special Policy Area treated all new licences in Shoreditch with the same suspicion. This tries to distinguish.
It reflects a view, common now among people who think about cities, that the best evening economies are varied. Food, culture, late shopping, as well as drinking. A district that only wakes up at eleven and is all bars is fragile and unpleasant to live in.
The Operator’s Perspective
For someone hoping to open a small restaurant in Shoreditch, the exemption would be welcome. Applying for a licence in a cumulative impact area is daunting and expensive, with lawyers and consultants and the risk of refusal. An exemption removes that hurdle for the smallest operators.
The hours limit is a constraint. Eleven on a weeknight is early for a restaurant in a district where people eat late. But it is workable.
Will It Work?
I think it could, with enforcement. Without it, the exemption becomes a side door.
My suggestion, for what it is worth, would be a simple public register showing which premises were licensed under the exemption and on what conditions. Neighbours could see what was promised. If a restaurant starts behaving like a bar, they would know what to report.
A Caveat
I am describing a proposal from a committee meeting in early 2025. I have not seen the final policy and cannot say whether the exemption was adopted in this form. The council’s licensing pages will have the current position.
The Larger Hope
If Shoreditch is to be more than a place people come to get drunk, it needs somewhere to eat that is not a chain and is not full by seven. Small restaurants are how a district matures. A licensing policy that makes room for them is worth trying.
And to Finish
The modern restaurant, with its sharing concept and its stools, is ripe for humour. The London Prat provides it in its English satirical news on small plates and UK satirical news about cocktail bars, where you will also find my other pieces on E1 after hours. Bohiney Magazine covers dining in America.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
