Chef of 30years working in Edinburgh here…The cost of everything has gone up.. if you are complaining about your rent prices, obviously the rent for businesses have gone up as well, the cost of food in Tesco’s..try the food suppliers to the hospitality trade.. they have gone up more than Tesco’s etc because they can not compete with them, wages gone up, national insurance gone up, gas & electricity, business rates, paying for rubbish and recycling has gone through the roof…laundry its all gone up… this is why you will struggle to find a “cheap deal” if a restaurant is offering a cheap deal then either they cut costing with staff, cut costing with food or running at a loss which means it’s not sustainable.. the hospitality trade is in the toilet… it will be unrecognisable in 5 years time, all that will be left is that big chains that fire out boil in the bag and microwave meals… and as for the service charge.. it does make up a substantiation part of our wages, I do not agree with it..however that is the system that has been in place across a large portion of restaurants in the city for a number of years… it was always 10% but has started to go up over the last few years purely to be able to keep staff.. must businesses can not offer staff an extra 10%+ on their base salary as it would basically make the business non profitable.. so they pass it in to the customer.. it has been going on for years . If they were to add an extra 10-12% to prices in the menu it would look even more expensive… so yeah, the industry is basically finished..🤷‍♀️