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food and drink |
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Though the British still tend to regard eating as a functional
necessity rather than a focal point of the day, great advances towards a
more sophisticated appreciation of the culinary arts have been made in
recent years. Every major town has its top-range restaurants, many of
them boasting awards for excellence, while it's nearly always possible
to eat well and inexpensively, thanks chiefly to the influence of
Britain's various immigrant communities. However, the pub will long
remain the centre of social life in Britain, a drink in a traditional
"local" often making the best introduction to the life of a town
Eating
In many hotels and B&Bs you'll be offered what's termed an " English
breakfast " - or Welsh or Scottish in the respective countries - which
is basically sausage, bacon and eggs plus tea and toast. This used to be
the typical working-class start to the day, but these days the British
have adopted the healthier cereal alternative, and most places will give
you this option as well. Traditionally, a " Scottish breakfast " would
include porridge - properly made with genuine oatmeal and traditionally
eaten with salt rather than sugar, though the latter is always on offer.
You may also be served kippers or Arbroath smokies (delicately smoked
haddock with butter), or a large piece of haddock with a poached egg on
top. Oatcakes (plain savoury biscuits) and a "buttery" - not unlike a
French croissant - will often feature.
For most overseas visitors the quintessential British meal is fish and
chips (known in Scotland as a "fish supper", even at lunchtime), a dish
that can vary from the succulently fresh to the indigestibly oily - it's
little wonder that lashings of salt, vinegar and tomato ketchup or the
fruitier brown sauce are common additions. The classier places have
tables, but more often they serve takeaway (takeout) food only,
sometimes supplying a disposable fork so that you can guzzle your
roadside meal with a modicum of decorum. Fish-and-chip shops (" chippies
") can be found on most high streets and main suburban thoroughfares
throughout Britain, although in larger towns they're beginning to be
outnumbered by pizza, kebab and burger outlets.
Other sources of straightforward food throughout the day are " greasy
spoons " (which tend to close at around 6-7pm), and pubs (which usually
stop serving food by 9pm), where you'll often find plain "meat-and-two-veg"
dishes: steak-and-kidney pie, shepherd's pie (minced lamb or beef
covered in mashed potato, and baked), chops and steaks, accompanied by
boiled potatoes, carrots or some such vegetable. However, a lot of
British pubs now take their food very seriously indeed, having separate
dining areas and menus that can compete with some of the better mid-range
restaurants. In the smallest villages the pub may be the only place you
can eat. Another recent development is the growing number of specialist
vegetarian restaurants , especially in the larger towns, and the
increasing awareness of vegetarian preferences in other eating places.
In Wales especially you'll come across dozens of small, inexpensive
wholefood cafés, often doubling up as alternative resource centres. Also
on the rise in the major towns are vaguely French brasseries , informal
bar/restaurants offering simple meals from around £10-12 per head and
often with a set lunchtime menu for around half that.
Britain has its diverse immigrant communities to thank for the range of
foods in the mid-range category. Of the innumerable types of ethnic
restaurants offering good-value high-quality meals you'll find Chinese,
Indian and Bangladeshi specialities in every town of any size, with the
widest choice in London and the industrial cities of the Midlands and
the North. Other Asian restaurants, particularly Thai and Indonesian,
are now becoming more widespread in England, but are generally a shade
more expensive, while further up the economic scale there's no shortage
of French and Italian places - by far the most popular European cuisines,
though most cities also have their share of Spanish tapas bars. Japanese
food has been one of the success stories of recent years, with sushi
bars joining the expense-account restaurants that have been established
for some time in the business centres.
The ranks of Britain's gastronomic restaurants grow with each passing
year, with cordon-bleu chefs producing high-class French-style dishes,
California-influenced menus, internationalist hybrid creations, and
traditional British meat and fish dishes that are as delicious as the
more arty creations of their cross-Channel counterparts. London of
course has the highest concentration of top-flight places, but wherever
you are in Britain you're never more than half an hour's drive from a
really good meal - some of the very best dining rooms are to be found in
the countryside hotels. The problem is that fine food costs more in
Britain than it does anywhere else in Europe. If a place has any sort of
reputation in foodie circles you're unlikely to be spending less than
£30 per head, and for the services of the country's glamour chefs you
could be paying up to a preposterous £120.
Drinking
The combination of an inclement climate and a British temperamental
aversion to casual chat makes the simple café a rare phenomenon outside
the biggest cities. A growing number of pubs now serve tea and coffee
during the day, but in most places you'll attract consternation by
asking for a cup; in the more genteel tourist towns - such as Stratford,
Harrogate and York - you'll find plenty of teashops , unlicensed
establishments where the normal procedure is to order a slice of cake or
some other pastry with your tea or coffee. Increasingly common in the
big cities are brasseries or equivalent establishments, where the
majority of customers are there for a bite to eat, but where you're
generally welcome to spend half an hour nursing a cappuccino or glass of
wine.
Nothing is likely to dislodge the pub from its status as the great
British social institution. Originating as wayfarers' hostelries and
coaching inns, pubs have outlived the church and marketplace as the
focal points of communities, and at their best they can be as welcoming
as the full name - "public house" - suggests. Pubs are as varied as the
country's townscapes: in larger market towns you'll find huge oak-beamed
inns with open fires and polished brass fittings; in the remoter upland
villages there are stone-built pubs no larger than a two-bedroomed
cottage; and in the more inward-looking parts of industrial Britain
you'll come across no-nonsense pubs where something of the old division
of the sexes and classes still holds sway - the "spit and sawdust"
public bar is where working men can bond over a pint or two, the plusher
saloon bar, with a separate entrance, is the preferred haunt of mutually
preoccupied couples, the middle classes and unaccompanied women.
Whatever the species of pub, its opening hours are daily 11am-11pm (in
quieter spots, closed between about 3pm and 5.30pm), with "last orders"
called by the bar staff about twenty minutes before closing time. The
legal drinking age is eighteen and unless there's a special family room
or a beer garden, children are not usually welcome.
Most pubs are owned by large breweries who favour their own beers and
lagers , as well as some "guest beers", all dispensed by the pint or
half-pint (a pint costs anything from £1.20 to £2.70, depending on the
brew and the locale of the pub). Cider , the fermented produce of apples,
is a sweet, alcoholic beverage produced in the English West Country,
where it's often preferred to beer; the far more potent and less refined
scrumpy is the type consumed by aficionados of the apple. The cider sold
in pubs all over Britain is a fizzy drink that only approximates the
real thing. As with beer, the best scrumpy is available within a short
radius of the factory, but the drink has nothing like the variety of
beer. Wines sold in pubs are generally appalling, a strange situation in
view of the excellent range of wine available in off-licences and
supermarkets. The wine lists in brasseries and wine bars are nearly
always better, but the mark-ups are often outrageous, and any members of
the party who prefer beer will have to be content with bottled drinks.
Nonetheless, many people are prepared to pay the extra in return for a
less boozy and less male-dominated atmosphere.
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