Restaurants

Don’t we all just love to go to restaurants?

Some of us tend to go to restaurants more on special occasions like Birthdays or stag parties or hen parties or end of school year, let-your-hair down celebrations (teachers!), or wedding anniversaries. But for many people these days, it has become part of everyday or more precisely, every week life, to go to restaurants in Brighton & Hove. Saturday night in particular, for those who don’t have small children, becomes a night out which starts or even ends in restaurants in the case of the Saturday night pub and curry crowd. Even in this climate of financial stress it is surprising just how many people are to be found in Brighton & Hove restaurants on Friday and Saturday nights.

While shops may continue to close down, there still seem to be plenty of new restaurants and coffee shops opening up. It would seem that the people of Brighton & Hove are always looking for somewhere nice to take a break, meet friends and enjoy something good to eat and drink. A place like Brighton & Hove and its surrounding area in Sussex offers a number of different types of restaurants from the established Indian, Chinese and Italian to the more exotic Thai and Mexican.

The dining out experience comes from as far back as Roman times where restaurants were called “thermopolia”.
In thirteenth century China restaurants catered to all different styles of cuisine, price ranges and religious requirements. Even within a single restaurant a huge choice was available and people ordered the entree they wanted from written menus. An account from 1275 about Hangzhou, the capital city for the last half of the dynasty stated:
“The people of Hangzhou are very difficult to please. Hundreds of orders are given on all sides: this person wants something hot, another something cold, a third something tepid, a fourth something chilled; one wants cooked food, another raw, another chooses roast, another grill”.

The modern restaurants however come from eighteenth century France and they nowadays tend to be more specialised than in those ancient times. And probably the clientelle in general is not quite as demanding but don’t tell your local waiters that!
To be sure Sussex can attract many people from many lands just like throughout the entire British Isles and with this influx of different peoples, many tastes are being catered for.

This means that the indigenous population of Brits is eating in all kinds of restaurants these days where once upon a time, restaurants mostly in the form of taverns and inns were predominantly offering only English fayre.