Doom and gloom abounds. Tumbling like-for-like sales have led to share price crashes and at least one administration.

Yet, there have been glimpses of sunshine too. Domino's Pizza had a bumper Christmas, while Tragus, owner of Café Rouge and Bella Italia, followed up the caution of competitors with a solid plus 4.5% like for likes for the festive season.

So what is it really like out there? How bad is trade?

To get a better sense of the state of the market, Peach Factory last week conducted its own poll of chief executives across both the pub and restaurant sector, among both big and small businesses. In all 33 company chiefs responded to the online survey.

And what was the result?

The best description would be that the market had an 'uneven' Christmas and New Year; the picture was far from uniform. While some operators had a dire time, others flourished. However, pubs fared much worse than restaurants and food business overall was markedly better than alcohol sales.

Looking forward, the majority of operators believe that January and February will be tough, but the outlook for the 2008 as a whole is much more optimistic.

Trading across the board appears not to have been as bad as some predicted. The survey provided a complete spread of results ' 48% of respondents reported negative like-for-likes, 3% saw no change, while another 48% had positive like-for-likes. In all, 36% reported like for likes above 3%, with 15% ahead by 7% or more. In contrast another 15% had like-for-likes down by 5% or more, with 24% seeing sales dip by just 1% to 3%.