Diners are moving away from fancy fine dining, says the co-editor of The Good Food Guide.
Liz Carter, who has helped put together this year’s list of the top 100 best local restaurants in Britain, puts a lot of this down to the cost-of-living crisis.
“It’s been a terrible time for everyone – we’ve all got less money,” she says.
“There will always be fine dining and there will always be bucket-list places, but to go and eat out at the best local restaurant, it’s all about affordability.”
According to Carter, this trend has led to a welcome increase in female chefs working in kitchens.
Local restaurants are “where female chefs are finding their feet, rather than in fine dining – which is very structured and very stressful”, she suggests. “These are women-led kitchens, and it’s lovely to see that women are developing at this affordable level of dining.”
Carter and the team of experts at The Good Food Guide have ploughed through 60,000 nominations to come up with a list of Britain’s Best Local Restaurants, shining a light on spots all over the country – with regional winners including Edinburgh’s Fin & Grape, Inn at the Sticks in Llansteffan, Cibus in Levenshulme and Fowey’s North Street Kitchen.
“Our readers are saying no to fine dining – they want to eat in the local restaurants,” Carter says of their findings.
This wasn’t the only revelation to come out of the list. Carter says she noticed an “ongoing trend for French cooking”, which perhaps explains the restaurant that took the number one spot: a French bistro in Leeds called Bavette.
“It ticked every box in our list of criteria… We actually call it the model of a perfect local restaurant,” Carter says.
“It’s owner-run, it’s local, it’s warmly welcoming. We felt the food and the service were just so close together, you couldn’t say one was better than the other. It was such a great restaurant… While we were there checking it out, we could hear people at the next tables really enthusing about the food.”
Owner-run restaurants are a big thing the experts look for. “There is nothing as good as a place where the owner is there who really cares,” she explains.
“He or she could be in the kitchen, could be front of house – but it really helps when the owner is present.”
Bavette is also affordable, Carter says, which is another important aspect of the judging criteria.
“We always say that the best local restaurant is the kind of restaurant you would love to have at the end of your street. It’s the place where you go if you don’t feel like cooking – if you suddenly want to celebrate good news.
“It’s that kind of place, but also very affordable – you can pop in and have one dish and a glass of wine, or you can have a big three-course blowout.”
The experts were also looking for places that give you a “warm welcome”, as well as centring around “local, seasonal produce”.
Carter accepts that it’s “still tough” for restaurants right now. “Prices are going up, it’s still hard – restaurants find it hard to recruit,” she says.
But she ultimately feels positive about the future of local restaurants. The list celebrates “wonderful service, wonderful food, wonderful seasonal produce. I’m really optimistic about restaurants in this country”, she notes.
After 60,000 nominations – 30,000 more than the team received last month – Carter says: “Everybody is piling behind their local restaurant.
“They want it to succeed – it can only succeed if people support them.”
