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?

I imagine it was (extremely) mass-produced, onelittle, I don't think the restaurants actually made any of it!

It was just one of those very 80s/90s things, I think.

it's called orange or lemon ripieno. i think they are mass-produced

Ah, I did not know they had a name.

Sorry, I am derailing this thread by remembering stuff from 20 years ago. Though evidently they still exist.

you still get them - it's a very generic pudding menu that must be sold to lots of restaurants

sorry i keep cross-posting LRD!

Huh. I need to go search them out for nostalgia value. I live somewhere with decent Chinese now, so no joy.

No, no, thanks for telling me!

i think it's got a lot better, but you need to know where you're going.

there are two food-based pubs near me. the first is cheaper, but serves bought-in stuff. the second is a couple of quid more expensive on each dish, but everything's home made, and tastes a lot better for it. I'd rather spend the extra, but am surprised at how many people are less bothered.

Likewise in the centre of town. There are some great independent places, but you have to walk past an awful lot of chains to find them.

Depends where you are I think. Food in Ireland is terrible though.

I live in London and would disagree OP. Great choice, great food, but not cheap. But then food isn't cheap in tesco s.

I've had some great food in Ireland but it has mostly been outrageously expensive. Vanilla Pod in dublin was an exception. Food in France used IMHO to be better. I've had some hugely disappointing meals there in last few years. 10-15 years ago, a poor meal in france was, for me, a rarity.

LRD thanks for the link. That orange one looks really intriguing. It looks like really orange skin but I can't see how you stuff the icecream in there. The coconut one explains my suspicion as it's not a really coconut shell. At least it doesn't look like one in the picture. But you know what I'm curious enough to order a orange or lemon one now if I see it on a menu!

And FYI, this is the type of desserts you would find on a Cantonese menu. (All the Chinese regions serve different things).
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tong_sui

You can imagine why my DH would find them ... not to his taste. The people who run the restaurant here do need to be creative to find puddings people would actually order.

they're empty orange skins filled with ice cream / sorbet, and they've been kept in the freezer pre-made iirc

Oh, I'm sure they would be revolting really, one. I can't remember well enough.

Your DH is Cantonese?

I don't know much about Cantonese cooking but there's a really good Sichuan restaurant near us, and (to me anyway) the way it tastes you wouldn't be in the mood for a western-style pudding afterwards. But I a lot of Chinese food I ate in Nottingham has been very anglicized, very, very sweet and gloopy.

I had something from the local take-away when I was visiting my parents around last Christmas and oh, my god, it was vile. Still, can't have everything, I guess.

I remember having lemon sorbet, in a lemon, at Indian restaurants in the 90's, it appeals way more than processed frog fallopian tubes (from onelittle's link), so I can see how sometimes mass-produced is more popular than authentic!

I always remember those ice cream/sorbet served in fruit affairs from indian restaurants growing up. I too thought they were the height of sophistication. The restaurant generally distanced themselves from the dessert offering by simply slotting the manufacturer's ready-printed menu card/booklet into their own menu. You'd get a big A4 menu book thing with a shiny A6 dessert thingy inside.

I once had a Thai meal out with friends. We were all students. It was a set menu thing with some sort of soupy dessert. It was horrible. One of my friends ate everyone's dessert, which would have been fine except that mid-way through bowl number 3 he announced that it tasted 'exactly like what he imagined cum would taste like' then happily ploughed his was through the rest. He's never lived that down.

I agree generally. There are some exceptional restaurants here but generally speaking they are much lower quality than for example France. I travel a lot and even in motorway services in France the food is freshly cooked and good quality

LRD I'm from Hong Kong and DH is a kiwi. (My family moved to Auckland when I was young so am also a kiwi). Therefore DH has to endure these challenging desserts.

calamitously I'm sure DH would prefer the sorbet too. Though I don't think he knows he was served frog Fallopian tubes! See
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasma
There's a picture of it cooked in a soupy dessert. It looks innocent enough. He objects to the taste of the thing more. Like what maddy says. He didn't say it tastes like cum though. Just terrible. Or maybe he does but just won't say it. Bless him.

Sorry it's you who mentioned the cum taste calamitously

Poor DH 'enduring'.

Is it, excuse me, salty, then?

I love finding out what other cultures find tasty/revolting. I reckon even when we're talking small geographic differences like Ireland/England, that's part of it. Eg., I really notice how much more salt people put into food in some places. It's not 'bad cooking' in itself, but definitely not what I'm expecting.

He says the black sesame is bitter (as in bitter sweet). A lot of them taste like water with sugar. The only ones he like are steamed milk pudding, steamed custard pudding and anything with a lot of coconut milk. I suspect those are more to his taste because they have more familiar ingredients. Or maybe just more 'dairy' and richer tasting.

The steamed milk one is quite similar to panna cotta, for example.

Doesn't Sat Bains have Michelin stars so I would expect that to be pricy. I loved the service at World Service and think there and Harts serve decent food even if it is London prices.
Petit Paris was awful the last time I went.
There is a Keralan restaurant called Kayal on Broad Street in Nottingham. Lovely curry both times I have been there, they have one in Leicester too and very inexpensive.

I live in Singapore where eating out is a national pastime. When we visit the UK we find it hard to get decent food and, as someone said up thread, it is hard to find places open in the evening at the weekend. Last year in Dorset we struggled to get petrol or food on a Sunday at 7pm, and this was in August so the height of the tourist season.

I agree that the food in Singapore is amazing, so can see why the UK might fare poorly by comparison. Still don't get the comparison with Ireland though...