Two hospitality businesses, one Somerset town (Part 2)

How the current economic climate brought an end to a popular restaurant in Frome

Salutations. You are reading the second half of this two-parter on what it’s like running a hospitality business in the current economic climate, aka Possibly The Worst Time Ever. 

In case you missed it, Part I, which featured Frome’s new Filipino grab-and-go shop Tondo, came out last week and can be read (in full, for free) here. 

Two hospitality businesses, one Somerset town (Part I)

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What it’s like to close a hospitality business (in Somerset) right now

Burrito Boi co-founders Dom and Alex

Last week’s WFJ article touched on the notion that, according to the rate of restaurant closures at the end of 2023, that quarter of that year was the most fatal quarter for restaurants there ever was.

So far, anyway – by the look of things (with particular reference to an uncharacteristically slow festive period), we may see an even longer casualty list by the time the first quarter of 2024 comes to an end. 

Burrito Boi – Frome’s much-loved Mexican takeout-turned-restaurant and street food outfit – is one of those UK businesses to end up on that unenviable list. “I knew I was closed straight after the Christmas holiday,” Dom Palmer, Burrito Boi’s co-founder, tells the WFJ. “As soon as January started, me and [co-founder] Alex we were just like, ‘we can't do this.’”

COVID was bad. The cost of living is/was bad. The main reason so many hospitality businesses are having an even harder time of it now, however, is because the debt accrued during consecutive crises of recent years has, finally, caught up to them. That being said, for Burrito Boi, as will be true of many other businesses with similar troubles, the factors contributing to their demise are multiple, messy, and nuanced. 

In that sense, the following conversation with Dom isn’t a mourning of what a Somerset town has lost, but a curious, granular, and at times brutal recount of how it lost it.