UK hospitality industry hit by crisis as thousands of young Italians are forced out by latest round of rules and cost-of-living crisis

Emanuela Reccia has lived in London for almost a decade. She was a teenager when she left her home city of Naples to become a waitress in the UK, bringing her expertise and love of Italian cuisine to the capital.

But the 27-year-old, like thousands of other Italians working in the UK hospitality industry, now feels she has no option but to leave and return to Europe after the latest round of post-Brexit rules.

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High-end restaurants in the UK are battling for business as eating – and spending – habits change

A meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant is a chance to savour some of the finest cooking in the country, often over many hours, with several courses and wine pairings.

But high-end restaurants are now turning to speedy set menus to entice customers through the door for weekday lunches, promising diners they can be in and out within an hour.

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The comedian eats out at 670 Grams, run by rising-star chef Kray Treadwell, where carrots inspire joy and handbags get their own seat

• Rock cakes in a shed, underground art and conceptual cocktails: a Brummie insiders’ guide to Birmingham

“I thought sweetbread was just bread that’s sweet,” admits comedian Joe Lycett, holding up a morsel of Kray FC, veal glands plucked from a bucket decorated to look like the Colonel’s famous fried chicken tub. The snack, a new version of one of chef Kray Treadwell ’s signature dishes, is golden and crisp, gently spiked with fermented hot sauce, zhooshed with garlic emulsion and bedazzled with tiny gleaming globes of oscietra caviar.

We’re side by side in Bodhi Boys, the pre-dinner lounge beneath restaurant 670 Grams, and I encourage Joe to shove the meat in his gob and trust the process. He needs little encouragement and I make fast work of my veggie version, a mouthful of fried cauliflower.

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The chefs care so much about the exact positioning of the vitello tonnato , it’s physically painful

Exmouth Market in London EC1 isn’t by any means a secret hotspot, but it’s a fair bit less trampled by food lovers than, say, Borough Market or Spitalfields. Sure, this thoroughfare may well be one of the nicest places in London to waste three to six hours over lunch, drinking vermouth and eating ice-cream, but it’s still a hard sell to tourists.

“Did you know that Moro was the birthplace of the British small plate?” I tell people, brightly. “And it’s so close to Sadler’s Wells, too!” Reactions are generally muted, but those naysayers will now miss out on Morchella , a new place by the people behind the much-loved Perilla up in Stoke Newington, which recently appeared on the corner of Rosebery Avenue inside an imposing, former late-Victorian bank. In recent years, this gargantuan space with its high ceilings has been leased by various pizza restaurants, so you’d expect that by now its yesteryear charm might have been somewhat flattened, but, oddly, it’s quite the opposite. In fact, due to Morchella’s revamp using natural wood herringbone floors, the ghosts of the London & South Western bank have never been so present.

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This new restaurant in Birmingham is tiny, but its ambition and bursts of flavour are extra large

Cuubo, 47 High Street, Harborne, Birmingham B17 9NT ( cuubo.co.uk) . Three-course lunch £30; three-course dinner £50; tasting menus £75; wines from £25

Until 6pm that day, chef Dan Sweet, an intense sliver of a man, was moonlighting as a builder. His site: the restaurant we had just eaten in. There were walls that needed an extra lick of paint. There was some grouting that needed doing. The few narrow, slatted wooden panels, which are practically the room’s only design feature, needed a little attention. Then he put on his whites and set about training the restaurant’s new waiter, the tall elegantly dressed man with the tied-back dreads, who is actually a neighbour and was just doing him a favour. He had to be got up to speed because this was the first time he had worked in a restaurant in two decades. Back then the tills didn’t have touch screens.

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Recently opened by the Royal Free Hospital, Freddie’s serves up a special sort of comfort

Freddie’s, Belle Vue, Rowland Hill Street, London NW3 2AQ ( freddiesdeli.co.uk ). Breakfast plates £6-£15; starters £8-£13; sandwiches and platters £7-£17.50; desserts £4.50-£8; unlicensed

Today, I am rehearsing for my dotage. I am doing this by gripping a properly stacked salt beef sandwich; the sort of multilayered, bulging affair that challenges the structural integrity of the sliced rye bread which is trying and failing to enclose it. The cure on the thick-cut tangle of salt beef is deep and there’s just enough amber fat to lubricate everything. On the side are sweet-sour “bread and butter” pickles, so called because the Illinois cucumber farmers who devised the recipe in the 1920s were able to barter their pickles for household goods, like bread and butter. This is the kind of vital intelligence I will share with younger companions over a salt beef sandwich when I am a certified alte kaker , Yiddish for old fart. Having just told this story, perhaps I am already eligible for certification.

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This is essentially 16 years of the chef’s homesickness for Wales on a plate, complete with a laverbread garnish

The Shed , close to the waterfront in Swansea, lives in a hulking industrial Victorian redbrick warehouse that once served the former docks. Now, chef Jonathan Woolway , after 16 years at London’s beloved St John , has finally returned home to Wales and set up shop, or rather a big, beautiful shed, here. Woolway is from Swansea, and passionate about fanning the flames of the local food scene. He’s serving bara brith – a traditional fruit loaf flavoured with tea – with slices of heritage teifi cheese , as well as family-recipe Welsh cakes with a shot of whisky; there are also hot, crisp croquettes made with local cockles and potted Câr-y-Môr crab with warm flatbreads.

Swansea, which is Wales’ second city, does not enjoy the same tourist attention as Cardiff, or lure book-lovers as Hay-On-Wye does, or draw the Gore-Tex-clad visitors to Snowdonia. But it does feel like a slice of living, breathing, everyday Wales, with a diminished town centre grappling to find new purpose. Yes, there are bits that look rather forgotten and shabby, with numerous boarded-up shopfronts, but there are also sleek, hopeful areas such as the SA1 Waterfront Area, which is where Woolway and his team are now showcasing Welsh produce and the future of local culinary talent.

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The term evokes cosiness, affordability and community. But it’s being used as a cynical marketing ploy

What makes a neighbourhood restaurant? The phrase itself is evocative, bringing to mind the types of local trattorias or ocakbaşları or tavernas that punters return to regularly. The definition might vary from person to person, but surely a neighbourhood restaurant is defined by some combination of its longevity in the community, an accessible feel and affordable prices.

Over the past six months, though, I have seen the “neighbourhood restaurant” label deployed constantly in PR emails previewing a very different sort of establishment. The aim, I imagine, is to evoke a sense of cosiness and community – but there’s something off about it.

Lauren O’Neill is a culture writer

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