Pub Restaurants - a contradiction in terms?

Once upon a time (ie when I was a lot younger than I am now!) you knew where you were. There were pubs, which served drinks, and restaurants, which served dinner. If you wanted a sandwich or snack you went to a cafe and afternoon tea and cakes could be had in a teashop.


Then along came the fast food outlets, but they just added places where you could eat a burger for lunch or a kebab when you came out of the pub.


Now restaurants (and pubs) serve ‘traditional pub fare’ (or worse, ‘fayre’). Traditional pub fare is, surely, a packet of pork scratching with your pint! The only food choice to be made in our local twenty years ago was whether to go for cheese and onion crisps or salt and vinegar. If the establishment was really up market the landlord might even stock peanuts!


Now, they’d have us believe that traditional pubs have always served lasagne, shepherds pie and scampi and chips. I do remember chicken in a basket – introduced to keep punters at the bar downing drinks when otherwise peckishness would have sent them to the nearby chippie – and there was ‘Betty’s hotpot’ served in the Rovers Return at some time I seem to remember, but steak dinners and sticky toffee puddings were never part of the pub repertoire in my youth.


I am now confused as to what constitutes a restaurant, since so many pubs seem to serve more food than drink, and many restaurants have a bar at which you can drink before and after your meal... so where do you draw the line?


The only eateries which now seem to fully deserve the title of restaurant are those pretentious places serving the likes of ‘nouvelle cuisine’ which arrive at the table on a huge square plate on which is carefully and centrally placed a blob of some unidentifiable pureed vegetables of the portion size and consistency which I gave to my babies at four months old, topped with a sliver of fish or meat the size (and often the texture) of a postage stamp, the whole garnished with a twig of some herb or other and drizzled with a teaspoonful of some tasteless sauce. For which the mug – I mean diner – is charged three times the price of a huge plateful of shepherds pie at the local pub.


Suddenly, the thought of the pub restaurant doesn’t sound so silly – perhaps they were just filling the gap in the market!