In brief

A fish-and-chip shop in Bristol becomes the unlikely site for a polling station when it opens its doors to voters today (7 June). The owner of Mr Crispins fish-and-chip shop, Amir Amrabadi, explained: "The council was under pressure to find a central site and they approached me." The shop is open as normal during polling.

The depth of business losses confronting the hospitality and tourism industry in North Yorkshire as a consequence of foot-and-mouth disease is at least £200m, according to a survey conducted last week by the Yorkshire Tourist Board.

El Rincón, Claudio Pulze and Raj Sharma's Spanish-style restaurant in London that closed unexpectedly just six months after it opened, is to become an Indian restaurant.

The 70-seat El Rincón in Pond Place, Chelsea, was the fifth in Pulze and Sharma's Cuisine Collection restaurant group. It opened in October and closed in April (Caterer, 19 April, page 4). A Cuisine Collection spokesman said the new restaurant would be a "less formal" version of the group's Zaika Indian restaurant in Fulham Road.

City Inn, the hotel company run by Sandy and David Orr and jointly owned by the Bank of Scotland, starts building work this week on a 461-bedroom hotel alongside Millbank Tower in London.