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?