Dessert houses in Preston: the late trade that needs no bar

The newest food format in the city, and the only one whose business begins after the pubs have stopped serving.

A dessert house is a late-evening business that does not sell alcohol, and both halves of that matter. Trading late puts it in the part of the day the licensed trade owns; carrying no licence means it is open to every age group at an hour when almost nothing else in the city is.

That combination is why the format appeared, and it appeared recently. It is the newest category in Preston's eating and it did not replace anything: it found a gap in the evening that the existing trade had no way to fill.

Why the licence is the whole model

A licensed venue makes its margin on drink and its evening is shaped around that: a bar, a minimum age after a certain hour, and a closing time set by the licence. Take the drink away and every one of those constraints goes with it. What is left is a business that can seat a family at ten o'clock, and that is a market the pub trade cannot serve at all.

It also explains the fit-out. These are bright rooms with hard surfaces and counter ordering, because the trade is short visits in volume, and none of the things a bar needs are present.

Where the format sits in Preston

Late trade needs people out late, so this category is a centre one, on and around the streets that already carry the evening. It shares those streets with the licensed trade and takes a different hour of them, which is a rare arrangement in a city centre: two formats in the same place with almost no overlap in customers.

A second cluster follows the student population north of the commercial core, for the same reason the food to go trade does: a large group of people within walking distance, out at unusual hours.

What this category is not

It is not the cafe trade. The cafe geography is on the cafes sheet.

Nor is it a restaurant that happens to open late. The visit is short, the ordering is at a counter and the pricing is per item, which makes it a different proposition from anything on the eat and drink index.

A trade with a season as well as an hour

This category has a seasonal shape the rest of the evening trade does not. School holidays lift it, because the customers it can serve at ten o'clock and the licensed trade cannot are families; a warm late-summer evening lifts it again. Term-time weeknights are its thinnest hours, which is the opposite of the pattern in the licensed rooms around it.

Anyone reading the streets on a busy August night and a quiet February one is seeing the same businesses under two different conditions. It is the clearest example on this site of a format whose trade is set by the calendar rather than by its address.

The hours nothing else is open for

The demand window is the whole business case. Between about nine in the evening and midnight, a city centre has an audience with nowhere to sit that is not a pub: groups too young to drink, families after an event, people who want an hour out without an alcohol licence attached to it. The dessert house is built for exactly that hour, which is why it appears in the centre and in the retail parks and almost nowhere in between.

It is also the reason the format arrived late and grew fast. Nothing in the older trade covered that window, so the units it took were the ones a daytime business had left behind — a shopfront that had been a phone shop or a card shop, converted cheaply, open when its neighbours are dark.