If You’re Open, Are You Really Open?

This week I went to Gail’s for a hot cross bun, heard they were the best so I had to go and try them. I went around 2:30pm for my lunch as I saw they were open until 6pm online .

However arrived and asked for my hot cross bun and was told the kitchen had closed at 2pm.

I was gutted.

And yes, I know in the grand scheme of life this is not exactly a crisis. But it did get me thinking about something hospitality does all the time, often without even realising it: places are technically open, but the actual offer quietly disappears hours earlier.

And as a guest, that feels rubbish.

Because from the customer side, “open until 6pm” means open. It does not mean open for coffee only. It does not mean open for half the menu. It does not mean open unless you wanted the one thing you actually came in for.

It means open.

That is the bit hospitality sometimes gets wrong. We think operationally. Guests think emotionally.

Operationally, it might make complete sense to shut a kitchen at 2pm. Maybe labour is tight. Maybe footfall drops. Maybe it just does not stack up to keep the full offer running all day. Fair enough.

But emotionally, the guest does not experience your labour model. They experience disappointment.

They walk in already thinking about the thing they are about to order. They have built the moment up in their head. In my case, it was a hot cross bun. In someone else’s case, it is brunch, lunch, dessert, a roast, a cocktail, a coffee and cake catch-up, or the one dish they saw online and specifically came in for.

So when they get told, “Sorry, that’s finished now,” what they hear is not an operations explanation.

It is like going into Currys wanting to buy something, only to find out it is not actually there. It is a small disappointment, but it still feels like a letdown. And hospitality should be trying to avoid that feeling wherever it can.

And honestly, I do think Britain is getting worse for this.

Not because people do not want hospitality. They clearly do. OpenTable says dining out in the UK is up 4% year on year, and group dining is also up, which shows people still want to get together and go out. But it also found a 6% increase in dining between 4pm and 5pm, which suggests we are leaning earlier and earlier. (OpenTable)

That fits with a wider shift too. According to the ONS, the number of people working evening or night hours in the UK fell from 9.5 million in 2016 to 8.7 million in 2022, and the share of the workforce doing night-time work dropped from 30.8% in 2014 to 26.7% in 2022. That is bigger than restaurants, obviously, but it does help explain the feeling that Britain is becoming less of a late-running country. (Office for National Statistics)

Hospitality itself has been shrinking under pressure as well. UKHospitality said last year that the sector was 14.2% smaller than it was in March 2020, with 22.7% fewer independent restaurants than before the pandemic. When margins are tight and survival is the priority, later trading is often one of the first things to go. (UKHospitality)

So maybe it is not just in my head.

Maybe Britain really is becoming a place where we say we want lively cities, vibrant high streets and strong hospitality scenes, but we also increasingly accept kitchens shutting early, reduced menus, shorter service windows and a kind of low-key retreat from the full experience.

And that is where the comparison to places like Spain becomes interesting.

Go to Spain and dinner at 9pm or 10pm is completely normal. Go to Dubai and late-night cafés are part of the standard offer, not some quirky niche. Visit Dubai literally promotes late-night cafés as part of the city’s food culture. (Visit Dubai)

Then come back here, where in many places 8.30pm can already feel a bit late to eat, and 9pm can feel like the city is winding itself down.

That is not me saying Britain should become Spain overnight. Different cultures are different. Different cities are different. Chester is not Madrid. I get that.

But I do think there is a bigger question here about what kind of hospitality culture we want.

Because being open is not the same as being available.

There is a difference between having the lights on and actually offering hospitality in the way the guest expects. And those little mismatches matter more than businesses often realise.

Those small moments are what hospitality is built on.

That is why this matters.

Because hospitality is not just the act of unlocking a door in the morning and locking it again at night. It is about meeting people where their expectations are. And if your opening hours create one expectation, but your actual offer delivers another, that gap is where frustration lives.

To be clear, I am not saying every café should run a full kitchen all day long. That is not realistic. Costs are brutal, staffing is hard and every business has to make decisions that work commercially.

But I am saying this: if your kitchen shuts at 2pm and the site stays open until 6pm, make that painfully clear.

And don’t say no to a customer wanting a hot cross bun because the kitchen is closed when it only goes in the toaster.

This blog is not really about a hot cross bun though. It is about expectation.

Because in hospitality, being open is not the same as being available. And if we want thriving cafés, restaurants and city centers, we need to get better at closing the gap between what guests think they are walking into and what they actually find.