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.
Beefeater was one of its best ideas. Launched in 1974, it borrowed shamelessly from its predecessor Berni Inns, a steakhouse with a short menu, small prices, mock-Tudor interiors and friendly faces. Berni was mostly urban; Beefeater was suburban, capitalising on increasing car ownership, cheaper out-of-town sites and a family-friendly offer. Whitbread was a brewer, with plenty of pubs ready to convert, and by 1990 it seemed to have won the competition when they purchased Berni Inns.
It offered people cosmopolitan glamour. An early menu has prime rump steak for 77p and for 65p a half-bottle of Liebfraumilch, the now-disreputable sweet white wine typified by Blue Nun. They introduced people to prawn cocktails, steak Diane, Black Forest gâteau and horn of plenty ice creams. There was a dessert trolley laden with profiteroles, lemon meringue pie and rum baba with sugared Angelica, all with pouring cream. The children’s menu even had a bespoke Mr Men character, Mr Beefeater, who held a halberd, wore a Tudor bonnet and had a wife and two small children.
In the eighties, it got madder still. A site in Harpenden had a stream and a water wheel inside despite having no natural source of water. Another in Sheffield had an “olde world village” built from stone, complete with village hall, pond and trees. Theme pubs were one answer to growing competition for people’s leisure time.
Clearly, they embedded themselves in the nation’s memories. One woman in the Manchester Evening News could remember in detail her first meal out with the girls she was training with in a hair salon. She was 15 just then and is now on the verge of drawing her pension. For others it was hot bread rolls arriving as soon as you sat down, or tall glasses of Knickerbocker Glory, the “height of decadence”. One working-class child felt as though they were “on telly”. There is now an entire website, Beefeater Memories, set up for customers to record those recollections and visit their local branch one last time. Though if you are reading this, you are probably too late.
By 1997, there was an increased interest in British cuisine. Chefs like Fergus Henderson, and Gordon Ramsay had reignited our passion for British food. Beefeater launched a new menu seeking to capitalise on it. At this point it could be fairly claimed that the chain had “done as much as Elizabeth David to shape the dining habits of the nation”, but that writer for the Independent had decided to eat in one situated round the back of Charing Cross station.
Ben Rogers said the fish was unnaturally dry, a kebab rubbery, and their breaded mushrooms like “garlic pus.” Whilst his waitress was charming, the verdict was devastating: “Even McDonald’s looks stylish, cheap and good quality by comparison.” The sneering wasn’t exclusive to the national publications. The Manchester Evening News praised Beefeater for trying to make carparks exotic, but the mushroom pudding was a suet tomb filled with “watered-down tinned soup”.
By 2000, Whitbread’s ambition had run its course. It spent the next quarter of a century stripping back its over-expansion. Brewing beer went first, then Pizza Hut and TGI Fridays. Costa eventually went to Coca-Cola. And Beefeater was put up for sale in 2024, but a buyer for all of the chain’s restaurants could not be found. Whitbread is now cutting 3,800 jobs to pursue what they describe in corporate terminology as a “pure-play” hotel chain.
Which is ironic, because in 1987 Whitbread saw the success of Travelodge and wanted it for itself. It founded Travel Inns, motel-like accommodation built beside successful Beefeaters, which in time became Premier Inn, the empire it now prizes above everything else. Beefeater restaurants were the original reason the hotels were successful; now the hotels are cannibalising the restaurants. Many sites will become additional Premier Inn rooms.
I had intended to eat in my nearest Beefeater before writing this, between Twickenham and Feltham and next to a roundabout. I don’t drive, so I got on the H22 bus, and when I arrived it was already closed for good. So was the Premier Inn next door, though the woman who was presumably being made redundant was in no mood to explain in detail. The next nearest was beside a dual carriageway near Harrow, or on the A25 slip road in Guildford. I gave up. Not long ago these out-of-town sites were the future. At some point we decided that eating next to motorway bypasses was no longer innovative, and the bet that Beefeater made 50 years ago eventually turned out to be the wrong one.
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