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The data in the latest Market Recovery Monitor from CGA and AlixPartners suggests that while many pubs and bars have also struggled to survive the pandemic, it is restaurants that have fared worst.
CGA and AlixPartners measured the impact of the last 13 months on pubs and restaurants that hold a licence to serve alcohol.
Looking at the net number of venues, once all closures and new openings were taken into account, they found pubs across Britain fared slightly better than the restaurant sector.
The number of pubs serving food has fallen by 4.2%. Bars and pubs that only serve drinks fell by 5.2%.
But on top of the near-20% fall in casual dining outlets, bar-restaurants, which make up a smaller part of the overall dining market, fell by 9.6%.
General restaurants, which are the largest dining out category, are down 10.2%.
"The main challenge for restaurants, in comparison to pubs, is that the restaurants all tend to be leased premises - they all have landlords and rent to pay," says Graeme Smith, managing director of AlixPartners.
"When their revenues stopped, their rental bills continued to build up, unless they managed to reach an agreement with their landlord.
"Unfortunately, with the burn of costs of rent and other costs of business, for a number of restaurants, that was simply too much to keep going through the period of closure."
And while restaurants that belong to larger chains were sometimes able to fall back on the group financially, or negotiate agreements with landlords across the business, independent operators have found it harder to survive.
The restaurant sector was already shrinking before the pandemic, but the net losses between 2017 and 2019 were between 0.9% and 2.2% a year, according to CGA AlixPartners data.
Source: BBC