The Michelin Star Effect: What Independent Optical Practices Can Learn from Restaurants That Did Less

What the restaurant world figured out that many opticians haven't

There's a pub in a village in North Yorkshire called The Black Swan at Oldstead. It seats a small number of diners. It opens five evenings a week, plus Saturday lunch. It charges £175 a head for dinner. It holds a Michelin Star and a Michelin Green Star, and in 2017, TripAdvisor named it the best restaurant in the world.

It doesn't do Deliveroo.

The Banks family, who own and run it, deliberately decided what kind of business they wanted to build—fewer covers. Better food. Higher prices. A waiting list rather than a walk-in. The result is a restaurant with no meaningful competition — because nothing in its postcode or the next ten postcodes is trying to do what it does.

That is not an accident. It is a strategy. And it is one worth thinking about if you own an independent optical practice.

The volume trap

The pressure on independent practices is well documented. NHS sight test fees have not kept pace with costs. Corporate multiples compete on price and convenience. Online glasses retail takes a slice of dispensing revenue. The instinctive response to all of this is to see more patients, move faster, and fill more appointment slots.

Which is, roughly speaking, the restaurant equivalent of signing up to every delivery app going, cutting your portion sizes, and staying open until midnight. It might keep the lights on. It almost certainly doesn't build anything.

Delivery apps take commissions of 30% or more per order. Restaurants that chased volume through those platforms often found themselves busier and less profitable. The ones that went the other way — fewer covers, better experience, higher spend per head — frequently found the opposite.

It's a pattern that shows up across almost every service business. An independent optical practice is a service business.

What does doing less actually look like in practice?

This is not a post telling you to go fully private tomorrow, drop all your NHS patients, and double your prices. That is not the point. The point is a question worth sitting with: what would your practice look like if you optimised it for depth rather than volume?

Fewer routine appointments, more specialist clinics. Dry eye. Myopia management. A dispensing experience worth the price you charge. Frames that nobody else in your town stocks. Time in a consultation that a corporate appointment slot structurally cannot accommodate.

Independent practices that have moved in this direction — deliberately, not desperately — tend to attract patients who are exactly the right fit. Patients who return. Who refers. Those who spend more per visit and complain less about price. The opposite of a walk-in footfall model, and considerably harder for a corporate multiple to replicate.

The question is worth asking

The Black Swan at Oldstead is not for everyone. That is the whole point. The Banks family chose their customer, designed everything around them, and built a business that has no meaningful price comparison because price is not the frame in which the customer is buying.

Is there a version of that for your practice? Not necessarily at £175 a head — but a version where the quality of what you offer makes the price conversation irrelevant?

Worth thinking about.

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