Eating in four nations

British cooking is regional, immigrant, and recently proud of itself. You can eat badly anywhere, usually under a laminated photograph. You can also eat extremely well without a tasting menu: a bakery, a caff, a Syrian grill, a chippy eaten outdoors, a pub that cooks like a restaurant and still lets you sit with a pint.

Markets are the reliable introduction. Borough and Maltby Street in London, Kirkgate in Leeds, the Barras and more polished neighbourhoods in Glasgow, Cardiff Market, St George’s Market in Belfast. Go hungry in the morning. Leave before you are conducting diplomacy with a paper bag.

England’s everyday glory is breakfast, a good loaf, cheese, and the long coastal tradition of fish that was not frozen in a rectangle. Look for a pie only if the place is serious about pie. The Sunday roast is real; it is also, in tourist pubs, a way to sell a tired potato. Chinese, South Asian, Caribbean and Turkish kitchens are not “alternatives” to British food. In most cities they are the centre of it.

Scotland will feed you shellfish, bakeries, and a chip shop culture that treats a supper as architecture. Order the local fish if you are on the coast, and do not assume haggis is a dare — it is a spiced meat pudding, often excellent, sometimes a fridge magnet. Wales has lamb, seaweed, rarebit that deserves better than irony, and Cardiff as a proper restaurant city. Northern Ireland does bread like a civilisation: soda, wheaten, potato farls beside a fry that should be walked off along a sea wall.

You are usually not waited on at a counter. You often are in a pub restaurant. Tap water is free if you ask. Service is sometimes added at 12.5% in cities; read the bill before you add more. Tipping in a pub for a round of drinks is not expected. Splitting bills is normal.

Sunday and Monday close more kitchens than visitors expect, especially outside cities. Book the one dinner you care about. Eat the other meals wherever the queue is made of people who live nearby.