News that we now spend more on eating out than eating at home:

The Office for National Statistics said that consumers spent £87.5
billion in 2004 on food and drink in restaurants, pubs and takeaway
meals, double the figure spent in 1992.

Over the same period, food sales have grown at half the rate,
reaching £85.8 billion in 2004, the most recent year for which figures
were available.

Followed by lots of guff about how we’re all being more adventurous, British food is better than ever, ethnic varieties blah blah blah. Even the standard Gordon Ramsey quote.

Bollocks. It’s wealth. Exactly the same thing happened in the US a few years back. We know that as income rises the proportion of it spent on different things changes. Health care is the obvious one, the spending on it as a percentage of income rises as income does (up to a point but we don’t know where yet). The percentage spent on food to be consumed at home falls as income rises. And, as both the US and the UK show, the percentage spent on eating outside the home rises.

You don’t have to look very far back into history to find a near complete absence of restaurants in the UK. Pre WWII would do it. Berni Inns were really the harbringers of the revolution, followed by the curry houses.

This is very little to do with the (admitted) increase in the quality and variety on offer: they are a consequence, not a cause. It’s the other way around, increased wealth means greater demand for such things.