And this month’s prize for marketing ingenuity goes to the Hawksmoor team for its £15 steak frites offer on rail strike days.

It was, and still is, a piece of real promotional genius, not just because it probably attracted people into its city centre restaurants, but for the wider brand PR it generated. The “Strike Steak” offer was covered across national media, with CEO Will Beckett even penning an opinion piece for The Standard in London.

This makes it sound like a purely commercial enterprise, and the group made clear the reason behind its deal was to help keep its restaurants going and give people a reason to go into London, Edinburgh, Manchester and Liverpool, all the cities it has sites, despite the fact that it wouldn’t be making any money from the offer.

The deal is actually running on every day in July, strike or not, and on any future strike day affecting rail and tube journeys.

But as Beckett made clear in his newspaper column there is a bigger point. The hospitality sector has lost an estimated £3 billion since the strikes started, and although he wasn’t proportioning blame, it’s patently obvious that he like many other operators, especially in London, desperately want the disputes settled.

If food and energy inflation aren’t bad enough, travel disruption is just adding to the pain - and especially for small businesses without the financial headroom to weather every storm. At least in London the Underground strike was eventually called off, proving resolutions can be found.

As Beckett observed: “My restaurant group isn’t immune from these strikes — but as my grandfather used to say, we’re big enough and ugly enough to look after ourselves. The impact on small businesses up and down the country — especially in city centres, which rely on the work crowd — is much more severe, as it is on hundreds of thousands of hard-working people in hospitality. These problems then ripple through the wider economy.”

No business leader wants to be caught in the middle of a political row, as we’ve all seen where that can lead – and the long running rail disputes are as much political as they are economic. Will Beckett isn’t taking sides.

But the view of this would-be train traveller is that the Government must shoulder much of the responsibility for this chaotic state of affairs - and the collateral damage the rail disputes are having on business. Downing Street is not powerless, and the message I hear from business leaders is simply: “Get it settled.”

Times are tough enough, but most businesses aren’t actually looking for Government hand-outs, rather the opportunity and certainty to trade.

That’s true for the majority of hospitality operators I know. Despite the doom and gloom about the sector being spread in the wider media - and many news outlets are actively looking for a ‘hell in a handcart’ narrative - there’s a remarkable level of optimism among leaders.

People are going out to eat and drink, as the Coffer CGA Tracker shows month on month - and there’s plenty of creativity and innovation around on the operator side too, as Will Beckett and his Hawksmoor team have amply demonstrated.

A few weeks ago I was in conversation with a group of entrepreneurs from different parts of the market. All were conscious of the real challenges out there, but were nonetheless upbeat. In fact, their collective view was that they had emerged from the pandemic fitter, stronger, tougher – and ready to get on with it.

As Caravan co-founder Laura Harper-Hinton observed: “We’re feeling really positive and optimistic about where we are, having come through obviously tough times.”

She said her team had used lockdown to strengthen the Caravan operation: “We looked a lot at the foundations of the business….and decided to focus on the core of the operation—on what we needed to improve foundationally and get out the other side. That’s been great for us.”

Caravan is now back on the expansion trail, with new openings in the pipeline both inside and outside its London heartlands.

It was a similar story from Peach Pub boss Chris Stagg. The 21-strong pub company is now part of Revolution Bars, having been bought just after COVID. Stagg told me: “We took the opportunity [of COVID] to set out what we’re doing and say [to teams] either you’re on the bus or you’re not. We were quite hard with it and we came out in a much better place.”

John Nugent, CEO of London-based contract and events caterer Green & Fortune chipped in, saying his business had used the pandemic to find new sites and partners. “Things are pretty buoyant and we’ve just had our biggest month ever. There are challenges and bumps in the road everywhere, but we think we’ll get into seven or eight sites in the next three or four years and double our turnover.”

The bottom-line from these conversations – and the Hawksmoor promotion too – is that not all of the food and drink market is on the edge of disaster, although some businesses will sadly tip over.

The entrepreneurial flame still burns bright. There’s still plenty of positivity, resourcefulness and ingenuity – and politicians in particular need to see that rather than a sector that’s perpetually moaning.

What the industry doesn’t need is unnecessary obstacles put in its way. Can the Government please take note, roll up its collective sleeves and clear the track.