Beginning in late Victorian times, with the huge increase in urban office workers and shop girls, places to eat became an innovative business opportunity with Dining Rooms and Temperance public coffee houses offering alternatives to the well-established coffee taverns and pubs. Cheap simple food was very much the order of the day, but with the advent of J. Lyons and Co. Ltd., choices of places to eat became even more varied, setting the British public firmly on the scent of seeking out places to dine out.

By the mid-20th century virtually every British town and city had a catering establishment with the Lyons name on it, as the company’s success in catering and tea shops expanded into hotels where fine dining became popular among the middle classes, who had always previously eaten and entertained at home.

In the opening years of the 21st century, we have plenty of choices for dining out, with fine restaurants in all sorts of communities, from tiny villages to our largest cities. Britain’s imperial past and waves of immigration have added their own flavours to more traditional restaurant dining, offering as they do additional delights to tempt the diner.

Wherever our best restaurants are found, and whatever their menu choices, they have one overwhelming factor in common – the quality of their ingredients. A resurgent public interest in where our food comes from and how it is produced and prepared is reflected in the media – from newspaper food pages to the numerous television and radio programmes about food and drink. Our best restaurateurs and chefs are also rising to the challenge with imaginative dishes and menus, from the traditional to the exotic, using top quality ingredients.