to think the standard of restaurant food in England is, in general, very low?

[cailindana]

I love eating out. When I lived in Ireland I did it all the time. My home town is very small compared to English towns (though big in Irish terms!) and it had a wide range of excellent restaurants and pubs that served really really good food. Not cheap, but excellent quality and well worth what you pay for it.

Here I find the quality of food is really poor. It's very easy to eat out cheaply here but very hard to find somewhere that does really good food. I live in the East Midlands and it is exceptionally hard to find a restaurant that just does simple food but to a very good standard. For example the pub near where I used to work in Ireland did delicious homemade vegetable soup with homemade bread and gorgeous toasties on homemade bread as their lunch menu. Nothing at all fancy but very high quality and always done to perfection. Here, I can't find anything nearly similar and quite a few times, even in expensive restaurants, I've had food that wasn't cooked properly or just wasn't very appetising. Today we paid £34 for two very basic burgers that were served with frozen chips and tesco-standard coleslaw along with a very tiny children's meal. For that money in Ireland (generally) you would be guaranteed that everything would be very high quality, including handmade chips and coleslaw, frozen or packet stuff just wouldn't be acceptable.
Is it just that I live in a bad area for restaurants or is this just general thing around England?

The French may have Mr Hollande but their restaurants are much better value.

Some great offerings around here (also some rotters), not going to live location as don't want to out, but I'm not in a major city (or the E Mids).

We were in London & Manchester this weekend. Great food in both places. Again, also plenty of crap to be had.

I totally agree OP. I recently went to Carlow for a few days. Had lunch out in a cafe and a steak dinner on a pub. They were the best meals out I have had in absolutely ages.

We had meals in Greece on holiday that were beautifully and simply cooked with fresh ingredients, for an average of €12 a head.

Around here, it's all bloody chains.

You're living in the wrong area. There is an over abundance of amazing pubs and restaurants within cooeee of where I live.

It depends on where you live in the UK and also on how much effort you make to find the good restaurants. Chain pubs are rarely any good for food in my experience.

Oh that's a shame - you poor lot in England. Come up here to Scotland, go to Wales, or pop across to N Ireland - the food everywhere else in the UK is absolutely brilliant

I'd like to name and shame, sorry to derail.
Frankie and Bennys. Everything is deep fried frozen orange shit.
Chiquitos.
Pizza Express. Overpriced tasteless pap.
Most of the chains are awful.
I like Pizza Hut though. The salad bar idea is genius: I've yet to see a child refuse to go up and pick any veg.

Great places in Chester
The Grosvenor Arms in Aldford. ( don't go to the Pulford one)
Sticky Walnut.

London's great.

Went to Byron burger on Friday for a lovely burger, onion rings, home made coleslaw - was really good quality. £8.95 for the burger, sides were £3. Beer was expensive at £5.

When I saw the title of your thread, I though "you should try eating out in Ireland". We were in Ireland earlier this year and found the food, and particularly the range of food on offer, disappointing.

Quite agree! Sick of mass produced meals churned out, want home-cooked freshness.

Dog in a Doublet outside Whittlesey. £10 Sunday lunch that will turn you into an elephant seal.

I say England because I've never been to Wales Scotland or NI, but I've lived in three different places in England. The SE was better than here in the east midlands, but not much better.
I've eaten at the Vic in Beeston. It was good but still not great. In another pretty upmarket cafe in Beeston I had to send chicken back as it was pink in the middle. They heated up the same cut up piece of chicken and gave it back to me!! I was absolutely disgusted. Luckily when the manager got involved he offered me a free meal to make up for it but I was so shocked at the disgusting attitude from one of the very few places I actually like around here.

I think that it is down to the expectations of the area that you are eating in.

I can think of 10 or 12 places off the top of my head in and around my local town, but they are all in competition with each other. If the standard drops people will take their custom else where.

When we hadn't lived here long and didn't know the area we decided to go to the Jamie Oliver restaurant on the assumption that it would at least be edible. How wrong could we be? It was horrible. I had ossobuco that was watery with mushy soggy polenta. It was like someone had slopped old baby food on the plate. Awful.

I like the Italian in Beeston, Amores I think it's called.

I agree with others - England is a big place, totally depends where you are talking about.

We live in Scotland and I find that when we go to the Lake District the standard of the pub food and the niceness of the pubs in general is a lot higher than what we have here. Also found some wonderful cafe type places - The Two Eggs in Bowness is particularly good.

That's not to say that there aren't some great restaurants in Scotland. What I find in the UK in general is a wonderful diversity of restaurant types, so if I go into the centre of Edinburgh I can eat French, Italian, Indian, sushi, vegetarian, fish, Greek restaurants etc. etc. We are just back from France and as usual whilst the food is nice, there is very little variety and each restaurant serves more or less the same type of menu. Ditto Italy where in Rome there were literally hundreds of places with identical food. I'm sure the quality and presentation was different in many places but at least here we have great variety.

there are some OK places to eat where we live, but they seem to think everyone goes to bed at 9pm - even on a Saturday night it is hard to find somewhere that serves food after 9pm, and you can forget eating out on a Sunday night. Drives me mad as we often decide to go out to eat around 8.30pm and it's too late (apart from the large chains which aren't great)

I went to a Jamie's Italian once. The waiter kept touching me. No way would I go back.

It wasn't bad the last time I went to the one in Nottingham, Pico. Tiny bowl of pasta though.

I must have low standards because I quite like some chain restaurants. The ones I like to eat in are
Carluccios
Wahaca
Wagamama
Patisserie Valerie
Haven't been disappointed yet

The best places to eat in Nottingham are not I think the ones name checked above. Although World Service does a decent Sunday roast that isn't expensive.

There are some very good cafes in Hyson Green serving pakistani and bangladeshi food to the local population. Most of them will let you take your own alcohol at no cost. There are some good polish eateries around. A great Nepalese place out to Bramcote, although avoid the Sunday buffet. Crocus cafe serves some nice vegetarian food at lunchtime. You can get a very cheap reasonable curry at the Indian Community Centre at lunchtime.

Look at Trip Advisor for ideas. A lot of places the middle class restaurant going public go in Nottingham are over rated.

You live in the wrong place.

Loads of good places round here, that people travel to visit.

Is Wahaca still the same quality as when it started out? I'm not sure I would count it as a chain as they're only in London and don't they prepare fresh onsite?

Chains either tend serve OK food, but be much more expensive than an equivalent independent, especially for drinks, eg Wagamama, Jamies Italian, Pizza Express, or serve poor quality food and be a bit cheaper, but still a rip off for what you get eg Frankie and Bennys, Pizza Hut.