The last Beefeater restaurants are closing their doors tomorrow after Whitbread, the owner of Premier Inn and once one of Britain’s biggest restaurant companies, announced that it was shutting 197 of its standalone restaurants and pubs. Beefeater’s end marks a sad end for a restaurant that, in the nineties, was serving 19 million meals a year. A 1997 menu change was an event “more significant than” a launch by Terence Conran or Marco Pierre White, according to the Independent. Labour’s Budget, which added £50 million to Whitbread’s annual costs, is partly to blame. Rachel Reeves is no longer with us, but her decisions still are.
Beefeater was suburban, capitalising on increasing car ownership, cheaper out-of-town sites and a family-friendly offer
This is a meek end for one of Britain’s great corporate innovators and risk-takers. Whitbread started in 1742 as a brewer, building the industry’s first mass-production brewery, and later becoming the first to install steam engines. Two hundred years later, in the 1970s, there was scarcely a business it would not try: carveries, fish and chip shops, cafés, pizzerias, hamburgers, discos, country clubs, golf courses, leisure centres, coffee shops and off-licences. At one point it bought Beefeater gin, unrelated to the restaurant, then sold it. Somehow in 1989, it was the largest steakhouse operator in West Germany.
