£30 roasts, Michelin stars… has the gastropub lost the plot?

Walk into The Unruly Pig in Suffolk and you’ll find electric pink walls, pig-themed art and a dish involving liver parfait that locals can recite like a prayer. At The Coach in Marlow, draught beer flows beside a treasure chest of kids’ toys and baked potato “tonnato”. The Star Inn at Harome serves Yorkshire puddings to fifth-generation farmers who park their Massey Fergusons next to Lamborghinis. And at The Hand and Flowers, you can get a duck pie that costs more than a round in your local Wetherspoon – and still feel like you’re in your mate’s front room.

This is the modern gastropub. Thirty years after the term was coined, it’s still the place we go to eat well without enduring the sanctimony of fine dining. But with prices climbing and the lines between pub and restaurant increasingly being blurred, one question lingers over the bar: have we reached peak gastropub?

The term “gastropub” first appeared in 1991, when The Eagle in Clerkenwell decided to serve restaurant-level food without ditching its ale taps and barstools. It was a neat concept at the time: a middle ground between the fusty boozer and the starched-tableclothed restaurant. By 2009, the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs list had launched, further legitimising the movement and providing an annual barometer for the best pub cooking in the country. By 2012, it had earned a place in the dictionary.

What even is a gastropub in an age when nearly every pub serves decent grub? The lines have blurred. These days, any pub with a blackboard menu and a pork belly special wears the badge. Where once a ploughman’s was enough, now there’s “market fish with fennel pollen”. Napkins are folded, wine is decanted, and the question of what makes a pub a pub has become something of a national identity crisis.

“It becomes a restaurant when you can’t pop in for a pint,” says Tom de Keyser of The Hand and Flowers (Tom Kerridge’s place in Marlow, two Michelin stars and No 32 on Estrella Damm’s list). Sarah Hayward, head chef at The Coach (No 29 and down the road from Kerridge), admits, “We can try to escape the fact that we are generally known as a restaurant even though we distinguish ourselves as a pub.” But she insists it’s still a proper pub: no tablecloths, Sky Sports on in the background, great local beers.

“There’s pretty blurry lines on that score these days,” says Dave Wall of The Unruly Pig, which was crowned this year’s top gastropub in the country. “But there is one thing that I always think distinguishes, and that should be laid-back, unstuffy and relaxed service. And of course, you should always be able to get a cold pint.”

To imagine that pubs only discovered food in the 1990s is to forget the joy of a good steak and ale pie or a fish finger sandwich after a long walk. Chefs remember those early meals fondly.

“The warmth, energy and hospitality of the room, alongside a very refined version of a banging pie and mash,” says De Keyser, recalling his first truly great pub meal.

Andrew Pern, of The Star Inn at Harome, which ranked No 3 in the country, harks back to the 1970s, eating with his family at The Wheatsheaf in Egton: “I remember savouring their venison casserole, trout with toasted almonds and steak with stilton sauce.” By the 1990s, he was eating lobster thermidor and chateaubriand at North Yorkshire pubs like The Angel at Hetton, a “forefather of great food in pubs”.

Gastropubs didn’t appear out of nowhere: they emerged because the public’s expectations evolved. A generation raised on Ready Steady Cook and Saturday Kitchen didn’t want soggy chips with their pint. They wanted duck pie and rhubarb soufflé. Chefs responded.

“I couldn’t wait to anglicise these French classic dishes and give them a northern twist,” says Pern, who sees The Star Inn as an “English auberge-style inn”. That instinct to elevate without alienating is why the best gastropubs continue to thrive.

It also helped when Michelin started paying attention. The Stagg Inn in Herefordshire became the first pub to be awarded a Michelin star in 2001. Kerridge’s Hand and Flowers followed, becoming the first to hold two. It nudged the gastropub from a plucky upstart into the realm of serious cuisine.

There are plenty of explanations. Rising costs. Tighter margins. Utility bills that would make a utility company blush. A shortfall of chefs. A national staff crisis. But perhaps the most quietly revolutionary moment came in 2007: the smoking ban.

“I think a real catalyst for the growth of the gastropub industry in the UK was when the smoking ban came into place,” says Wall. “The culture of the ‘boozer’ definitely changed after that, and the popularity of ‘going for a pint’ declined.”

Add to that the decline in alcohol consumption, especially among younger people, and you get a simple truth: the pub had to evolve or die. Food wasn’t a gimmick. It was a life raft.

No one walks into a gastropub today expecting to pay £2 for a pint (those were the days). But the backlash to pub pricing has been especially vocal in recent years, with pints closer to £7, Sunday roasts north of £30 and fish and chips approaching fine dining territory.

“Unfortunately, prices have gone up, yes,” says De Keyser. “However, this is down to the cost of living and produce going up… If anything, I don’t believe pubs charge enough in relation to the rising tax, staff, ingredient and utility costs that they have to consistently manoeuvre around.”

Wall puts it bluntly: “Smaller businesses and independents have taken battering after battering on their profitability over the past few years… Inflation of prices is an absolute reality because the government has provided the industry with absolutely no choice.”

But these pubs aren’t unaware. They’re offering value where they can. “We offer an ever-changing seasonal set lunch menu, classics menu and house menu,” says De Keyser. “These three menus at different price points keep the pub accessible to all.”

At The Coach, Hayward offers a £15 set lunch mid-week. At The Unruly Pig, there’s a “Tasting Thursday” menu for £49 and a “Social Sunday” one. At The Star Inn, there’s a loyalty card giving 20 per cent off to regulars and locals.

So yes, a pie may now cost more than a tenner. But you’ll get impeccable service, a menu cooked with care and a pub that still knows your name.

The best ones still feel lived-in. That’s the word chefs use again and again. And not just in the nostalgic, smoke-stained sense.

At The Star Inn, you might see someone in waxed tweed playing dominoes by the bar while the Six Nations blares on the TV. There are cricket team photos on the wall. The ploughman’s is still on the menu.

“We have had lords, ladies, filmstars and even royalty rubbing shoulders with fifth-generation farmers,” says Pern. “Nobody bats an eyelid. We consider this a very democratic pub.” Turns out the dress code for democracy is wellies or a tiara – whichever is closer to hand.

The Coach has Sky Sports, a kids’ treasure chest and a regular guest who’s 101. “We even know which seats our regulars favour in the restaurant,” says Hayward.

“We know our regulars’ names, and they know ours,” says Wall. “We will always treat them as our most valued guests.”

The food may be refined, but the spirit remains the same: all are welcome, pint or no pint.

If anything, the gastropub has never been more necessary. A business model based on pints alone doesn’t cut it anymore. But the fear is that as more pubs go the way of celeriac remoulade and dashi-glazed carrots, the character will be stripped away.

De Keyser isn’t worried. “The gastropub will never peak,” he says. “Even though hospitality is massively feeling the squeeze at the moment, we will keep rising and attacking.”

And maybe that’s the answer. The gastropub isn’t an endpoint. It’s a continuation. A pub, after all, has always been a shape-shifter. What matters is not what’s on the plate, but how you feel while eating it.

They’ve been declared dead. They’ve been called the future of British food. They’ve been accused of gentrifying the local… and of saving it.

The truth is, the best gastropubs are doing something quite remarkable: being both a local and a destination. A restaurant and a refuge. A place where you can have a triple-cooked chip or a triple-layered conversation.

The point isn’t whether the gastropub has peaked. The point is that they’ve kept the pub alive – pint, pie and all.

Health workers to be sent door-to-door in bid to tackle sickness rates

Health workers will be sent door-to-door under drastic new NHS plans to tackle sickness rates across England, according to reports.

A community health worker will be allocated 120 homes to visit every month to see if help is needed under plans set to be rolled out in June, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Health secretary Wes Streeting said trials of the scheme showed “encouraging signs” in slashing the number of heavy NHS users which he called “frequent flyers” of A&E departments.

A pilot scheme in Westminster, London, showed a dramatic 10 per cent drop in hospital admissions over a year, The Daily Telegraph reports.

“We’re seeing some really encouraging signs about what can happen if you’ve got the right care in the right place at the right time,” Mr Streeting said.

The scheme, set to be rolled out in 25 parts of England, is part of Mr Streeting’s 10-year plan for the NHS, which could also see younger people directed to pharmacy care using the NHS app, leaving GPs to devote their time to sicker and older patients.

The health secretary said a modernised version of the health service’s phone app could mean the NHS could “do a much better and faster job of making sure patients get the right care at the right time in the right place”.

He told the i newspaper: “If you are someone who tends to be younger, fitter, healthier, you probably won’t need to see the same GP every time you are going in for something.”

In March, it was announced that NHS England would be abolished and the service would be brought into the control of ministers.

The changes marked a reversal of a 2012 shake-up of the NHS under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, which the Government said created “burdensome” layers of bureaucracy without any clear lines of accountability.

The plan will focus on the “three shifts” the Government say are needed, including moving NHS services towards more community-based care, preventing people getting ill in the first place and better use of digital technology.

Mr Streeting also repeated his belief that the NHS is “ not all about money”.

He said that “you can’t just keep on pouring ever increasing amounts of taxpayers’ money into a system that is not set up to deliver best use of that money and best care for patients and that’s why the system needs to change”.

Johnson and Sunak may have to give evidence at Manston inquiry

Former prime ministers, home secretaries and senior civil servants could be called to testify in an ongoing inquiry into unlawful conditions at a migrant processing centre.

A newly-released Home Office brief has revealed the potential scope of the inquiry into the overcrowding crisis at Manston detention centre in the autumn of 2022.

Incidents at Manston included a death in custody, unlawful detention of adults and children, and Home Office officials charged with conspiracy to steal and misconduct in public office, the document outlines.

The briefing document, marked officially sensitive, has been made public after an application by The Independent, The Guardian and the BBC to a High Court Judge.

It was prepared for home secretary Yvette Cooper a few weeks after Labour won the general election in July last year.

Ms Cooper was told that “the investigation of the conditions at Manston will probably be reputationally damaging for the Home Office”.

More than 18,000 people arrived on small boats to the UK between August and November 2022, with almost all of them being detained and held at Manston. People were forced to sleep on damp and mouldy wooden flooring without adequate bedding, denied warm clothing and footwear and unable to access clean clothes, according to separate legal submissions.

The site opened as a processing centre in February 2022, with small-boat migrants meant to be held there for short periods after arriving in the UK to undergo checks.

They would then be moved into Home Office asylum accommodation, most likely a hotel. The site was meant to have capacity for between 1,000 and 1,600 people, with migrants staying there for under 14 hours, but by 31 October 2022 there were around 4,000 people at Manston.

Migrants were held at the site for far too long, an official inspection found, with one family reportedly held for 32 days.

Diphtheria also spread at the base, and one migrant 31-year-old Hussein Haseeb Ahmed died in hospital on 19 November after contracting the disease. The medical cause of death was un-ascertained but an inquest heard that he had been suffering from breathlessness, a fever and drowsiness.

An independent inquiry into the crisis has been set up, chaired by Sophie Cartwright KC, to investigate what went wrong.

The internal brief also lists a number of allegations that were raised with the Home Office about the worrying conditions at Manston, a former military base in Kent, including misfeasance in public office, breaches of the European Convention of Human Rights, breaches of the duty to safeguard children, and breaches of planning permission, safety, fire, and food safety regulations.

Phones were unlawfully seized from residents, and property and money was confiscated and never returned, according to concerns flagged to the Home Office in October and November 2022.

The brief identifies key individuals who will likely be called up to the inquiry, which was launched in March this year. These include three former home secretaries, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Grant Shapps, as well as five former immigration ministers, the Home Office’s most senior civil servant Matthew Rycroft at the time, other senior civil servants, and a litany of officials from immigration enforcement, border force, asylum and private offices.

The brief, drawn up by the legal director at the Home Office, also lists Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and Ben Wallace as ministers who will likely be asked to give evidence about how their decision making impacted the crisis at Manston in 2022.

Charlotte Khan, Head of Advocacy and Public Affairs at Care4Calais said: “This is a damning charge list, and speaks to the scale of the scandal that ensued at Manston in late 2022.

“Reputational damage should be the least of the Home Office’s worries. People who were unlawfully held at Manston have long told us about the inhumane conditions they were kept under, but this briefing makes it clear that three senior Conservative politicians are in the dock for overseeing the unlawful detention of people, including children, alleged human rights breaches, and a death in custody.

“This was no way to treat fellow humans, and those in power at the time must be held accountable for the decisions made under their watch. The Inquiry must serve justice for those subjected to this cruelty at Manston.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The home secretary acted on the advice she was given to establish an independent inquiry into events at the Manston short-term holding facility between June and November 2022, in line with the commitments made by her predecessors, and on the terms agreed through the subsequent legal process.

“That inquiry will now proceed and we are supporting it fully, but it would be inappropriate to comment further whilst it is ongoing.”