When Dishoom announced last month that it had introduced the first weekday lunch offer in the Indian restaurant group’s 15-year history it sent a clear signal that the lunchtime trade was firmly in its sights.
Aimed at office workers and ‘hurriers of all types’, its Lunch with Promptitude menu is available Monday to Friday from 12pm to 5pm priced at either £16 or £20.
A few days later Pizza Pilgrims announced its own play for lunchtime trade, launching a £10 Midweek Margherita offer across its UK estate.
Although the two propositions are different in format and price, both are built around the same basic proposition: give consumers a clear price, a quick occasion and a reason to leave their desk or usual lunch routine. Both also show how competitive the battle for lucrative lunchtime trade has become.
A more considered occasion
For Dishoom CEO Brian Trollip, the move reflects a fundamental change in the economics and perception of going out to eat. “Eating out just doesn’t feel casual anymore,” he says.
Trollip argues that sustained inflation and rising restaurant costs have resulted in consumers becoming more considered about when and where they spend money on food outside the home.
“People are eating out significantly less over a month now than they were a few years ago,” he says, with many of those occasions coming out of lunchtime.
That makes lunch an important opportunity for casual dining operators – but also one where restaurants now compete with highly established QSR brands and grab-and-go habits. The challenge is therefore not simply to persuade consumers to spend money on lunch, but to persuade them that a restaurant is worth choosing over the increasingly convenient (and cheaper) alternatives available to them.
Speed is part of the proposition
Time has become one of the biggest barriers to the restaurant lunch. For a customer with an hour between meetings or the traditional one-hour lunch break, the appeal of a restaurant is undermined if getting a table, ordering, waiting for food and paying consumes most of the available break. Operators are increasingly recognising that convenience therefore must be built into the proposition rather than left to chance.
Dishoom’s Lunch with Promptitude offer, for example, is designed explicitly around this issue. Customers can book ahead, avoid queuing and are promised a meal that can fit into a 45-minute to one-hour window.
“It’s become important to us to be able to give people a clear headline price that delivers a healthy proposition for lunch, as well as a guarantee of being able to get in and out within an hour,” Trollip says.
Pizza Pilgrims is approaching the same problem from a different direction. Its Midweek Margherita, launched last month, offers a Neapolitan Margherita for £10 from Monday to Thursday between midday and 3pm across its UK restaurants. CEO Gavin Smith describes the lunchtime customer as particularly time-sensitive: someone who wants “quick and convenient” food without compromising on quality or experience.
A clear price
If time is one barrier, price is the other. Dishoom offers two set menus designed to be shared between two people: the £16-per-person Swift Vitality menu offers a choice of salad followed by two grills, while the £20-per-person Prompt Replenishment menu includes a small plate, grill, black daal and pulao. Outside London, the menus are priced at £15 and £18 per person, respectively.
Trollip says Dishoom typically sees lunchtime spending of around £18 to £25 but believes there is an opportunity to make the restaurant feel more accessible by presenting a straightforward value proposition.
“The perception is a real problem that the casual dining sector has had,” he says, pointing to the number of price increases consumers have experienced over recent years.
In the pizza category, pricing is even more competitive. Pizza Express recently introduced the £10 Power Lunch, where customers can order a main and a drink for just £10, and Pizza Pilgrims has also settled on £10 as its headline price, although customer can upgrade their order by adding a dipper and soft drink for a £2. Buffalo Margherita and Burrata Margherita options are also available, priced at £12 and £14, respectively.
The growing use of simple headline prices suggests that value is becoming less about discounting individual dishes and more about making the entire decision to eat out feel manageable.
Competing with the meal deal
The competitive set for the lunchtime occasion is also changing. Pizza Pilgrims describes its offer as an alternative to the ‘boring supermarket meal deal’ illustrating that it is not simply competing against other pizza restaurants but against supermarket meal deals and QSR options.
That raises the bar for casual dining. A restaurant lunch has traditionally offered something more than food – a change of environment, a social experience and a chance to step away from work. But those benefits have to justify the additional time and cost involved.
Trollip rejects the idea that quick-service restaurants necessarily ‘owned’ the occasion, arguing instead that casual dining was once a more obvious choice because it was more affordable. Restaurants now need to reclaim some of that accessibility, which means competing on the things that make a meal deal attractive – price, speed and convenience – while retaining the reasons consumers might prefer to sit down in a restaurant in the first place.
Pizza Express is one such brand that has identified QSR as a growing threat to lunchtime trade. It recently threw its hat into the QSR ring with the launch of a faster restaurant format that borrowed cues from QSR, including ordering kiosks and meal deals, to be a more attractive lunchtime as well as late night offer.
The new smaller restaurant format made its debut in Brixton and features a truncated menu of ‘fan favourites’ that include dough balls and a range of pizzette and pizzas. Launch deals focused on combos, such as a pizzetta and a drink for £6.95 and a classic pizza and a drink for £9.95, with the site aimed squarely at other QSR operators.
The format has since been rolled out to locations in Earl’s Court and Finsbury Park. “Whether it’s your new destination for lunch time favourites or late-night bites, this is Pizza Express pizza however you want to enjoy it,” Paula MacKenzie, Pizza Express CEO said at the time of launch.
Lunch as a testing ground
There is another reason operators are paying closer attention to the occasion: lunch can provide a useful window into changing customer behaviour.
Pizza Pilgrims sees its Midweek Margherita as more than a promotional mechanism. The company expects the data and insight generated by the offer to inform new product development for 2027.
The question is not simply how many customers can be persuaded through the doors between midday and 3pm, but what those customers want when they get there: how much they are prepared to spend, how quickly they want to eat, what products appeal to them and what makes them choose a restaurant over a supermarket or takeaway.
For an industry dealing with weaker footfall and consumers eating out less frequently, those insights could become increasingly valuable.
The fight is for the occasion, not just the customer
Neither Dishoom nor Pizza Pilgrims is suggesting that lunch alone will solve the wider pressures facing the restaurant sector. Trollip is explicit that footfall has been challenging and that consumers are eating out less frequently. But both businesses see lunchtime as an occasion worth fighting for.
The significance of their launches is therefore less about whether a £10 pizza or a £16 set menu represents better value. It is about the fact that both operators are deliberately designing propositions around the lunchtime occasion.
The battle is no longer simply over who can offer the cheapest meal. It is about whether casual dining can make the restaurant lunch sufficiently convenient, affordable and compelling to compete with the alternatives around it.
For operators, that may mean that the next phase of casual dining’s value battle is being fought not over dinner, but between noon and 3pm.