News and Reviews - Restaurants need new deals to keep their slice of the cake

Food Glorious Food: 20 March – 28 November 2010
From grow your own to celebrity chefs, school dinners to Sunday roasts – a new family-friendly exhibition at Weston Park will take a look at food’s place at the heart of British culture. Curated by Museums Sheffield, Food Glorious Food will explore our relationship with all things edible to tell the stories that lie behind what we choose to eat. 
Food – how we grow it, prepare it and eat it – is at the very heart of our society. What we eat, when, and who we share it with reflects who we are and forms a large part of our daily lives. Working in partnership with the University of Sheffield, Museums Sheffield has drawn on The British Library’s vast oral history archive and interviews with people from across the region to look at what’s gone from our farms, into our shopping trolleys and onto our plates over the last fifty years. From the influence of rationing, through the post-war expansion of world flavours, to our present crusade against fast food and focus on nutrition, this new interactive exhibition will show how the nation’s changing relationship with food has reflected the concerns of the age.
Exploring the journey from field to fork, Food Glorious Food will draw from Museums Sheffield’s collections of Social History, Visual Art and Decorative Art as well as loans from the V&A Museum of Childhood and The Museum of Brands. Budding cooks of all ages will enjoy our eclectic displays of labour saving gadgets, historic culinary devices and unusual recipes, before delving into our larder, stocked with interesting food stories and nostalgic packaging. Little green fingers will be kept busy in our vegetable patch play area, while the Food Forum will showcase archive footage from the British Pathe archive and allow visitors to share their own food likes, dislikes, recipes and memories.
Food Glorious Food is created in association with the University of Sheffield and will tour to the V&A Museum of Childhood, London, in 2011. The exhibition is supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Sheffield – Let’s Change4Life, a city wide programme focused on addressing overweight and obesity in children and families.
www.museums-sheffield.org.uk

Location: Weston Park Museum
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As usual, the new year has brought a profusion of sales to the high street and restaurants have joined the shops and stores offering discounts. You can find deals such as two for one at Café Rouge; main courses for £7 and kids eat half price at Pizza Hut; half-price vouchers at PizzaExpress; and second main meal for just £1 at Zizzi.
These deals have become an accepted and reliable way for mid-spend restaurants to build consumer traffic in quiet times. But they have now been around for more than 12 months and their currency is in danger of becoming debased.
Restaurant chains have got themselves into a tight corner over discounting that is likely to be difficult and time-consuming to get out of. And with so much competition on the high street between broadly similar outlets, it would take a brave operator to put an end to price promoting when the competition continues to discount.

Opinion piece by Peter Backman, the Times, 22nd February 2010. Read more:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/leisure/article7035574.ece

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