Why always pizza?

This week I spent a few days walking in Cornwall, stopping for lunches and dinners along the way. I'd love to tell you about all the interesting and varied food we ate, but the truth is it was hard to get away from just one thing...pizza.

It was everywhere. Every pub, every beach bar and half the restaurants in every town we visited were serving it in one form or another.

Pizza has long been a staple of eating out in the UK, but it's no longer confined to the pizzerias and takeaways that every high street has. It now turns up in pubs, most notably, but also in beach cafés, park cafés and even some smarter restaurants, where it occasionally masquerades as flatbread...I'm looking at you again, Café François.

Closer to home we have plenty of pizza restaurants, pubs with menus built around pizza, and many more that let you order in from somewhere else to eat at the bar. The team at Yard Sale have done a great job building this model, and you can see it at the Blythe Hill Tavern, Joyce and Brickfields, to name just a few.

It works well for everyone. The pub gets the benefits of having food on offer: longer dwell times, a broader range of groups through the door and ultimately more money in the till.

The pizza operator gets a string of proxy dining rooms across the area, without the rent, the staff and the complexity of a bricks and mortar site. It's a nice example of hospitality businesses working together, and it serves guests pretty well too...as long as what you want to eat is pizza!

Because between the pizza restaurants, the pubs serving pizza and the bars encouraging you order in pizza, it feels like a lot of what you can eat out these days is dough based!

The attraction for operators is easy to decode. Pizza is cheap to make, easy to prepare and very efficient on both wastage and staffing.

None of this is to demean the craft of a really good one. The dough takes skill and time to prove, the sauces are proper cooking and good ingredients cost money. But compared with a more traditional, or dare I say more ambitious, menu...pizza is an easy choice.

And that is really the point. We, as diners, are not craving more and more pizza.

This is a trend driven by restaurants, pubs and cafés playing defensively, in a world where margins are tight to non-existent and operators are doing everything they can to reduce risk just to make ends meet.

Take a look under the bonnet. One chef can make a lot of pizzas from a tight set of ingredients, combined cleverly to create a menu that covers all the bases (pun intended). Give that same solo chef even a modest menu of pub classics, bistro staples or, heaven forbid, small plates, and they'd quickly get into the weeds. More ingredients, more prep, more cooking methods. That means more equipment, more chefs and inevitably more waste. More cost, at every turn.

So in a world where restaurants and pubs are failing at an alarming rate, and costs keep climbing for operators like everyone else...why wouldn't you reach for the option that pleases the most people for the least cost and risk?

For the record, I like pizza. I really do!

But the extent to which it is taking over the eating out scene is a symptom of an industry that is struggling, and it's costing us all. We lose small independent places. We lose innovation. When margins are this tight there is no space to try something new, no room to experiment or be brave. The pull towards what is proven and safe overrides everything else, and pizza is the proven, safe and familiar answer that so many places are reaching for.

Which is why it was such a pleasure to spend Wednesday evening celebrating the opposite.

While I was pottering about in Cornwall, the teams from Wilson's, Oscar's, Fields and Plenty attended the Mayor of Lewisham Business Awards, a night celebrating some of the best loved businesses in our corner of South East London.

Spoiler alert: we didn't win any, but there's always next year!

The Best Restaurant award went to Gurkha's in Sydenham, a much loved Nepalese restaurant that has served its community for over 25 years...the kind of timescale we can only dream of. And Ladywell did bag one, as the Ladywell Tavern was named best pub in Lewisham. Massive congratulations to Joe and the team, who have put in so much work over the past few years.

It was a good reminder that, despite the backdrop, there are still people brave enough to start something new, and others who have been quietly doing it well for decades, serving their communities and inspiring the rest of us.