The bottom line? Restaurants could make older folks feel more welcome

There is only one thing worse than having to thumb your smartphone torch into life so that you can read a restaurant menu: the youthful twentysomething waiter noticing you do so, and bringing you one of those LED clip-on lamps. Short of wheeling in a Zimmer frame to use while popping to the loo, there’s nothing better calculated to make you feel like an old git.

It’s profoundly irritating, partly because it’s so unnecessary and it’s a huge own goal. It makes any restaurant seem exclusive; as in it was designed to exclude those of us not in the very first flush of youth.

The restaurant business is generally a younger person’s game. Running them requires the sort of long hours that those of us with a few years on the clock may no longer find appealing. And people in their 20s and 30s may have no idea what older customers want or need, because they haven’t got there yet. If a restaurateur only wants punters their own age, then fine. Turn down the lights. Turn up the music. Print the menu in six-point Comic Sans.

Otherwise, here is my plea: if you’re opening a hospitality business in 2022, employ someone who is at least in their mid-50s. Ask them to try out the seats. Are they padded enough for an arse that has done an extra 20 years’ sitting? Give them the menu. Is the point size legible without recourse to that torch? Does the lighting help? Does the combination of music and hard surfaces make conversation difficult for those who might have started to lose the top end of their hearing? Beyond the legal requirements of disability access, what are the stairs down to the loos like? And if you’re using gendered toilets, are the door signs obvious or are they bloody annoying? (The latter has nothing to do with age. Stupid loo door signs are always infuriating.)

Restaurants really ought to be welcoming to all those with the money to spend, and who has more of that? According to a pre-pandemic survey of household income from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, it is the over-50s. It doesn’t mean you have to target your restaurant at them; it just means you shouldn’t actively create a hostile environment.

The group that owns the Wolseley, the Delaunay and others in London actively recruits older staff. As co-founder Jeremy King put it not long ago: “There is so much experience and knowledge, or should be, among people who have lived a life compared to someone only a year or so outside of college.”

It’s nice to have a waiter who’s a grownup. Not least because, if they’re working there, I can be pretty sure I’ll be able to read the damn menu.