Scotland

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Food and drink

Though the British still tend to regard eating as a functional necessity rather than a focal point of the day, great advances towards a more sophisticated appreciation of the culinary arts have been made in recent years. Every major town has its top-range restaurants, many of them boasting awards for excellence, while it's nearly always possible to eat well and inexpensively, thanks chiefly to the influence of Britain's various immigrant communities. However, the pub will long remain the centre of social life in Britain, a drink in a traditional "local" often making the best introduction to the life of a town.

Eating

In many hotels and B&Bs you'll be offered what's termed an "English breakfast" - or Welsh or Scottish in the respective countries - which is basically sausage, bacon and eggs plus tea and toast. This used to be the typical working-class start to the day, but these days the British have adopted the healthier cereal alternative, and most places will give you this option as well. Traditionally, a "Scottish breakfast" would include porridge - properly made with genuine oatmeal and traditionally eaten with salt rather than sugar, though the latter is always on offer. You may also be served kippers or Arbroath smokies (delicately smoked haddock with butter), or a large piece of haddock with a poached egg on top. Oatcakes (plain savoury biscuits) and a "buttery" - not unlike a French croissant - will often feature.

For most overseas visitors the quintessential British meal is fish and chips (known in Scotland as a "fish supper", even at lunchtime), a dish that can vary from the succulently fresh to the indigestibly oily - it's little wonder that lashings of salt, vinegar and tomato ketchup or the fruitier brown sauce are common additions. The classier places have tables, but more often they serve takeaway (takeout) food only, sometimes supplying a disposable fork so that you can guzzle your roadside meal with a modicum of decorum. Fish-and-chip shops ("chippies") can be found on most high streets and main suburban thoroughfares throughout Britain, although in larger towns they're beginning to be outnumbered by pizza, kebab and burger outlets.

Other sources of straightforward food throughout the day are "greasy spoons" (which tend to close at around 6-7pm), and pubs (which usually stop serving food by 9pm), where you'll often find plain "meat-and-two-veg" dishes: steak-and-kidney pie, shepherd's pie (minced lamb or beef covered in mashed potato, and baked), chops and steaks, accompanied by boiled potatoes, carrots or some such vegetable. However, a lot of British pubs now take their food very seriously indeed, having separate dining areas and menus that can compete with some of the better mid-range restaurants. In the smallest villages the pub may be the only place you can eat. Another recent development is the growing number of specialist vegetarian restaurants, especially in the larger towns, and the increasing awareness of vegetarian preferences in other eating places. In Wales especially you'll come across dozens of small, inexpensive wholefood cafés, often doubling up as alternative resource centres. Also on the rise in the major towns are vaguely French brasseries, informal bar/restaurants offering simple meals from around £10-12 per head and often with a set lunchtime menu for around half that.

Britain has its diverse immigrant communities to thank for the range of foods in the mid-range category. Of the innumerable types of ethnic restaurants offering good-value high-quality meals you'll find Chinese, Indian and Bangladeshi specialities in every town of any size, with the widest choice in London and the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North. Other Asian restaurants, particularly Thai and Indonesian, are now becoming more widespread in England, but are generally a shade more expensive, while further up the economic scale there's no shortage of French and Italian places - by far the most popular European cuisines, though most cities also have their share of Spanish tapas bars. Japanese food has been one of the success stories of recent years, with sushi bars joining the expense-account restaurants that have been established for some time in the business centres.

The ranks of Britain's gastronomic restaurants grow with each passing year, with cordon-bleu chefs producing high-class French-style dishes, California-influenced menus, internationalist hybrid creations, and traditional British meat and fish dishes that are as delicious as the more arty creations of their cross-Channel counterparts. London of course has the highest concentration of top-flight places, but wherever you are in Britain you're never more than half an hour's drive from a really good meal - some of the very best dining rooms are to be found in the countryside hotels. The problem is that fine food costs more in Britain than it does anywhere else in Europe. If a place has any sort of reputation in foodie circles you're unlikely to be spending less than £30 per head, and for the services of the country's glamour chefs you could be paying up to a preposterous £120.

Restaurant prices

Our restaurant listings include a mix of high-quality and good-value establishments, but if you're intent on a culinary pilgrimage, you would do well to arm yourself with a copy of the Good Food Guide (£14.99), which is updated annually and includes nearly 1300 detailed recommendations.

Throughout this guide, we've supplied the phone number for all restaurants where you may need to book a table. At places categorized as "inexpensive", you can expect to pay under £10 per head, without drinks; "moderate" means £10-20, "expensive" £20-30, and "very expensive" over £30.

Regional cuisine

England is not particularly celebrated for its variety of regional cuisines, though most areas have a speciality or two, generally rather robust in character. Lincolnshire, for example, is known for its sausages, Lancashire and Yorkshire for their black puddings (a type of sausage), Cornwall for its pasty (a stodgy envelope of pastry filled with meat, potatoes and other root vegetables), and Melton Mowbray for its leaden pork pies. England's traditional cakes - among them, Bath buns, Bakewell tarts (or puddings) and Eccles cakes - can be found in bakeries on any high street, though they're at their most authentic in their place of origin. A few delicacies are seasonal, such as hot cross buns, available in the few weeks leading up to Easter. More refined dishes are to be had along the coasts - the best seafood is found in Cornwall, while oysters are a speciality in Whitstable - and a few English cheeses, notably Stilton, enjoy world recognition. England's regional beers are perhaps more distinctive than its food, however, and you'll find a much stronger emphasis on traditional cooking in Scotland and Wales.

The quality of Scottish food has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. Scottish produce - superb meat, fish and game, a wide range of dairy products and a bewildering variety of traditional baked goodies - is of outstanding quality and has to some extent been rediscovered of late. The quintessential Scottish dish is haggis, a sheep's stomach stuffed with spiced liver, offal, oatmeal and onion and traditionally eaten with bashed neeps (mashed turnips) and chappit tatties (mashed potatoes). Among other native staples is stovies, a tasty mash of onion and fried potato heated up with minced beef. Home-made soup is generally welcome in what can be a cold climate: try Scots broth, made with various combinations of lentil, split pea, mutton stock or vegetables and barley.

Welsh cooking is similarly in resurgence, as attested to by the many restaurants, hotels and pubs displaying the "Taste of Wales" (Blas ar Cymru) badge. Traditional dishes, such as the delicious native lamb, fresh salmon and trout, can be found on an increasing number of menus, frequently combined with the national vegetable, the leek. Particular Welsh specialities include laver bread (bara lawr), a thoroughly tasty seaweed and oatmeal cake often included in a traditional fried breakfast; bara brith, a fruit bread found in all teashops, Glamorgan sausages, a vegetarian combination of local cheese and spices; cawl, a chunky mutton broth; and cockles, trawled from the estuary north of the Gower. Dairy products feature highly in such a predominantly rural country, and there's a superb range of Welsh cheeses. The best known is Caerphilly, a soft crumbly white cheese that is mixed with beer and toasted on bread to form an authentic Welsh Rarebit.

Drinking

The combination of an inclement climate and a British temperamental aversion to casual chat makes the simple café a rare phenomenon outside the biggest cities. A growing number of pubs now serve tea and coffee during the day, but in most places you'll attract consternation by asking for a cup; in the more genteel tourist towns - such as Stratford, Harrogate and York - you'll find plenty of teashops, unlicensed establishments where the normal procedure is to order a slice of cake or some other pastry with your tea or coffee. Increasingly common in the big cities are brasseries or equivalent establishments, where the majority of customers are there for a bite to eat, but where you're generally welcome to spend half an hour nursing a cappuccino or glass of wine.

Nothing is likely to dislodge the pub from its status as the great British social institution. Originating as wayfarers' hostelries and coaching inns, pubs have outlived the church and marketplace as the focal points of communities, and at their best they can be as welcoming as the full name - "public house" - suggests. Pubs are as varied as the country's townscapes: in larger market towns you'll find huge oak-beamed inns with open fires and polished brass fittings; in the remoter upland villages there are stone-built pubs no larger than a two-bedroomed cottage; and in the more inward-looking parts of industrial Britain you'll come across no-nonsense pubs where something of the old division of the sexes and classes still holds sway - the "spit and sawdust" public bar is where working men can bond over a pint or two, the plusher saloon bar, with a separate entrance, is the preferred haunt of mutually preoccupied couples, the middle classes and unaccompanied women. Whatever the species of pub, its opening hours are daily 11am-11pm (in quieter spots, closed between about 3pm and 5.30pm), with "last orders" called by the bar staff about twenty minutes before closing time. The legal drinking age is eighteen and unless there's a special family room or a beer garden, children are not usually welcome.

Most pubs are owned by large breweries who favour their own beers and lagers, as well as some "guest beers", all dispensed by the pint or half-pint (a pint costs anything from £1.20 to £2.70, depending on the brew and the locale of the pub). Cider, the fermented produce of apples, is a sweet, alcoholic beverage produced in the English West Country, where it's often preferred to beer; the far more potent and less refined scrumpy is the type consumed by aficionados of the apple. The cider sold in pubs all over Britain is a fizzy drink that only approximates the real thing. As with beer, the best scrumpy is available within a short radius of the factory, but the drink has nothing like the variety of beer. Wines sold in pubs are generally appalling, a strange situation in view of the excellent range of wine available in off-licences and supermarkets. The wine lists in brasseries and wine bars are nearly always better, but the mark-ups are often outrageous, and any members of the party who prefer beer will have to be content with bottled drinks. Nonetheless, many people are prepared to pay the extra in return for a less boozy and less male-dominated atmosphere.

Beer

The most widespread type of English beer is bitter, an uncarbonated and dark beverage that should be pumped by hand from the cellar and served at room temperature. Though virtually extinct in England, the sweeter, darker "mild" beer and the even stronger porter are quite common in Welsh pubs. The indigenous Scottish beer is ale, much like the English bitter (in Scotland known as "heavy"). In recent years, boosted by aggressive advertising, lager has overtaken beer in popularity, and every pub will have at least two brands on offer, but the major breweries are now capitalizing on a backlash against foreign-sounding, pale, chilly and often tasteless drinks, a reaction in large part due to the work of CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale). Some of the beer touted as good traditional ale is nothing of the sort (if the stuff comes out of an electric pump, it probably isn't the real thing), and some of the genuine beers have been adulterated since being taken over by the big companies, but the big breweries do widely distribute some very good beers - for example, Directors, produced by the giant Courage group, is a very classy strong bitter. Guinness, a very dark, creamy Irish stout, is also on sale virtually everywhere, and is an exception to the high-minded objection to electrically pumped beers (though purists will tell you that it does not compare with the stuff sold in Ireland). Smaller operations whose fine ales are available over a wide area include Young's, Fuller's, Wadworth's, Adnams, Greene King, Flowers and Tetley's.

Scottish beers are graded by the shilling: a system used since the 1870s and indicating the level of potency - the higher the shilling mark, the stronger or "heavier" the beer. Scotland's biggest-name breweries are McEwan's and Younger's, part of the mighty Scottish and Newcastle group, and Tennents, owned by the English firm Bass. The beers produced by these companies tend to be heavier, smoother and stronger than their English equivalents, especially McEwan's Export, a mass-produced, highly potent brew, and Tennents' Velvet, a famously smooth ale. Younger's Tartan, though less flavoursome, is Scotland's biggest seller.

However, if you really want to discover how good British beer can be, you should sample the products of the innumerable small local breweries producing real ales to traditional recipes. Every region has its distinctive brew, frequently available at free houses - independently run establishments that sell what they please and are generally more characterful than so-called "tied pubs". In Scotland, Edinburgh's Caledonian Brewery makes nine good cask beers, operating from Victorian premises that preserve much of their original equipment. Others to look out for are Belhaven, a brewery near Edinburgh whose 80-shilling Export is a typical Scottish ale; Maclays, a hoppy, lightish ale brewed in Alloa; and in the Borders, Traquair Brewery, the only British brewery still to ferment its ale in oak, does a wonderfully smooth House Ale. The Orkney Brewery's Raven Ale could be a life-saver in the north, where good beer is hard to come by. Among beers worth sampling in Wales are the brews produced by the Cardiff-based Brains, whose Dark, Bitter and SA Best Bitter are among the finest pints in the UK. Llanelli-based Felinfoel and Crown Buckley also produce a number of excellent bitters.

For some serious research, CAMRA's annual Good Beer Guide (£10.99) is essential; if you see a recent CAMRA sticker on the window of a pub, the beer inside is certainly worth a try. Also useful is the Good Pub Guide (£14.99, Ebury Press), a thousand-page yearly handbook that rates each pub's ambience and food as well as its beer.

Whisky

Scotland's national drink is whisky - uisge beatha, the "water of life" in Gaelic - traditionally drunk in pubs with a half-pint of beer on the side, a combination known as a "nip and a hauf". Whisky has been produced in Scotland since the fifteenth century, and really took off in popularity after the 1780 tax on claret made wine too expensive for most people. The taxman soon caught up with illicit whisky distilling and drove the stills underground, and today many malt distilleries operate on the site of simple cottages that once distilled the stuff illegally. In 1823 Parliament revised its Excise Laws, in the process legalizing whisky production, and today the drink is Scotland's chief export. There are two types of whisky: single malt, made from malted barley, and grain, which, relatively cheap to produce, is made from maize and a small amount of malted barley in a continuous still. Blended whisky, which accounts for more than 90 percent of all sales, is, as the name suggests, a blend of the two types.

Grain whisky forms about 70 percent of the average bottle of blended whisky, but the distinctive flavour of the different blends comes from the malt whisky which is added to the grain in different quantities. The more expensive the blend, the higher the proportion of skilfully chosen and aged malts that has gone into it. Among many brand names, Johnnie Walker, Bell's, Teacher's and Famous Grouse are some of the most widely available. All have a similar flavour, and are often drunk with mixers such as lemonade or mineral water.

Despite the dominance of the blended whiskies, single malt whiskies are infinitely superior, and best drunk neat to appreciate their distinctive flavours. They vary enormously depending on the peat used for drying, the water used, and the type of oak cask in which they are matured, but they fall into four distinct groups - Highland, Lowland, Campbeltown and Islay, with the majority falling into the Highland category and produced largely on Speyside. You can get the best-known makes - among them Glenlivet, Glenmorangie, MacAllan, Talisker, Laphroaig, Highland Park and Glenfiddich, the top seller - in most pubs.