Every man’s meat - Berni Inns
From In Britain December 1980
There is a corner of every British town, it seems sometimes, that is forever Berni: a brightly lit, olde worlde façade where good value all-inclusive meals are available in plush surrounding that belie the price. Ray Gosling, a life-long fan of Berni Inns, tries to convey the taste of success.
MY FRIEND John is a bachelor, and like many people who live alone for ten years or so, he’s become a fair cook. We wanted to go out to eat, and he wouldn’t have a tandoori, or a kebab.
First we went to a trendy ‘English” peppermint-parlour type of new place where all the waitresses look like Mary Quant, and the waiters wear day-glo short trousers, and the walls are chromium and mirrors and blown up photographs of Humphrey Bogart and the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, but we just had a drink.
Then we went to a Berni and the steak was good. Give credit where credit is due. It was plain, thick and juicy. No sauce: no spice, but I must say, we both polished our plates.
Berni Inns are the largest licensed catering chain in England (probably in the world outside the USA). There’s more than a gross of them. They offer the same standard fare from Dublin to the Boat and Bottle in Norfolk; from Hope Street, Glasgow, to the Tudor Tavern, Canterbury, and The Grand on Plymouth Hoe (where Drake played bowls). Some are hotels where you can stay. Most are restaurants with bars.
The chain is a West Country forging, and for those not acquainted with British tradition the Bernis are very British. Not exactly roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but they make up for it in other ways. For all their Italian sounding name, Berni are Italian-Britons – who while not exactly being one of the families Julius Caesar left behind, do have a long pedigree. They’re British as Mountbatten or Marks and Spencer: and they operate a similar ‘up to the top’ patriotism and quality control.
Maybe that’s why Berni Brothers are often maligned by sophisticates and ultra-traditionalists, because they turn a pub into restaurants (plural) where Auntie Maud and the children can be sure the steak will be thick and the children half price. Usually cooked in front of them. You’ll be made to feel at ease, at home – never silly in a Berni – and the lavatories, will be clean-o. ‘Bland’, I believe, is the word of the maligners.
Within their limited menu, Berni are predictable and good value. They seem to hit on a happy medium, as my friend John finds. He has a plain mouth Berni can satisfy – at value for money prices. That means, an outlay of perhaps £4 or £5 a head for a complete meal based on duck, or plaice, or a steak that is consistently good, and served with a smile. Not too smarmy, but always there. I think Berni must have a secret farmhouse south of Merthyr Tydfil where they teach their waitresses smiling.
The Berni forebears came from Italy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras, to sell ice-cream from hand carts in South Wales when the valleys were winning rich seams of anthracite and the Welsh so busy with their black diamonds and singing in chapel. The Italians sold limeade for clearing miners’ throats and a ha’putth of snow (gelati) for the children. The Welsh were very good customers, and when the ice cream cornet season finished, the Italian pedlars doubled up with a mobile chip van.
I suppose they could have done spaghetti or macaroni cheese, but they didn’t. And soon they had seven day cafes – ‘Bracchi shops’, they’re still called in the valleys – after a Signor Bracchi who had one of the first. They married, had many children, brought their women over, and spread themselves in the fullness of time to coastal resorts – and as for the secrets of who really owns what, only Momma knows.
How they survived the 1939-45 war is another story, but many (not all) did. These Italians today are in every town south from the chocolate shop in Tain, the Glenmorangie distillery capital of Easter Ross, to the sundae bars of Eastbourne. Most of them are small-ish family concerns but some – Berni and Forte especially – are very, very big business.
Like Mountbatten, and similar to Billy Butlin, and the Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, the paradox of the Berni breed is they’re more British than British. They are unlike the post-war Italians who came to the big cities and opened pizzeria and trattoria.
In Berni, there’s no continental ambiance; no foreign phrase book is needed beyond Beaujolais. No fancy indoor plants, no oozing cake trolley – it’s cheese and biscuits to finish. Or ice cream. And a cup of coffee extra or, the Berni speciality, a glass of coffee. Mexican coffee, gaelic coffee, Drambuie coffee – every sort of coffee, but tea only by request.
The Berni success began in 1931, when Momma Berni died and left two sons, Frank and Aldo, £150 each, with which they opened a restaurant in Exeter.
By 1939 they had three, including one in Bristol, destroyed by war-time fire. And then gradually, and partly as a result of a trip the USA, they came upon the idea of the ‘steak bar’. Funny, that the steak bar had to be invented. Or to be more precise, its marketing had to be created.
The first one. The Tummer, in Bristol again, had been a pub since 1241. Rebuilt in 1565, and it looks it. Its guests had included Elizabeth I and William III. It had been terminus for the mail coach from 1784 until God’s Wonderful Railway, the GWR, arrived.
In 1956, Berni converted The Rummer to a fixed item, fixed price menu using simple foods, and cooking them plainly and superbly well. Just British meat and British drink: the only frill was in the printing of the menu. It was a huge success. And in Bristol, too - a town of so many fine, plain and fancy restaurants, and hard back bookshops, and a local population which, they say, sleeps with one eye open.
More in Bristol followed – the half timbered Llandoger Trow pub, where Alexander Selkirk met Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe was born. That was converted – and in 1964 Berni went national, and in 1970 merged to become a division of Grand Metropolitan, but still headquartered in Bristol.
Now another thing Bristol’s famous for is being shipshape: Bristol fashion. And it’s the wine port, but the Bernis, remembering Aunt Maud from the Rhondda and the Ebbw and the Taff, did they invest heavily in Chianti? No. The Bernis put in every restaurant an aperitif bar, with polished wooden casks of draught sherry and Bristol Milk. They ‘invented’ an extra large measure of the stuff: ‘the schooner’. Waitresses were trained to say: ‘Would you like a glass or a schooner, Madam?’ Oh, I don’t know, Maud was supposed to reply. What would you recommend?
Gastronomes help up their hands in horror – but it’s slipped down a treat with Auntie Maud and John sipping a schooner of sherry (or port) before a meal. It settles any collywobbles (nerves). Good for agoraphobics – it’s the Berni second special feature.
Of course they also sell bottled beer and spirits, and Guinness, and there’s a wine list.
There are usually no more than eight items on a Berni menu – steak, poultry or fish. And they are controlled. Two vegetables: mushrooms or side salad extra. It’s not true they count the number of peas per plate – but the do pride themselves on ‘portion-control and the ‘de-skilled’ preparation of food’. In other words, the chef (grill-boy in tall chef’s hat) shouldn’t have any gristle or fat to cut away. The Organisation have ‘their man’ watching the butcher, the abbatoir, the farmer – it’s quality control, Marks and Spencer style.
And in traditional surroundings. If the pub they bought wasn’t ‘olde’ enough, Berni will make it so. ‘Veneer it up’, that’s what their critics say. Then the meal will be real – but the Tudor can be phoney frills and furbelows. To some extent, the critics are right – but ‘most people’ prefer wood and plush to plastic and chrome – and a frilly table lamp shade is nice. And what would you expect on the walls of the Red Lion. Market Place, Doncaster, but prints of St Leger winners? Or the Berni at Tattenham Corner, Epsom Downs?
Berni have tried to buy old property of architectural and historic interest. They name every bar a separate restaurant, and add an extension, stain any new beams black, and point up the ‘character’ – but what’s wrong with that? What would you do with The Tudor, St Albans (a fine architectural piece); or The Tudor Tavern, Taunton (with ghost), or The Mitre, Oxford (1320) or the Wolsey Tavern, Leicester? And the Hole in the Wall, back in Bristol. In the days of the ‘press-gang’, Long John Silver was the landlord, and Robert Louis Stevenson is supposed to have written Treasure Island, in one go. I heard, in the room upstairs. A fine story – no writer would ever believe, out of jealousy. Today it has two Berni restaurants, the aperitif bar, and also a real ale bar.
The New Inn, Gloucester, has a really fine, old fashioned (genuine) coaching yard. It was one of the only two places where the tragic Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England. The Berni manager has now put an old coach in the courtyard.
In the Imperial, Widemarsh Street, Hereford, the manager, dressed as all Berni’s managers are in black jacket and striped trousers, has framed an almost life size photo of a big prize bull, just before you turn into the Pedigree Bar.
Some would say Berni don’t make enough of their historical properties. No little booklets (yet). No picture outside the Black Boy, Nottingham – and what would it be? England’s first black magistrate? Or didn’t they call the Restoration monarch Charles II ‘black boy’ – that’s less controversial, but what did he have to do with Nottingham? I’ve forgotten. I wonder – The Oliver, Bath – do Berni serve the celebrated Bath Oliver water biscuit as a treat? Maybe not. At one eating out critic wrote . . . ‘ Food is good and plentiful, and being a Berni Inn, there are no unpleasant surprises . . .’
But they are very customer sensitive. With expansion, they’re getting more discreet, less garish, more inventive, less all-the-same and obvious. Their latest acquisition is the Royal at Weston super Mare, where I went for lunch – and gosh it was good. They’ve done up the rooms, with the original high ceilings, absolutely delightfully, in softer pastel shades, more Queen Anne than Tudor, as befits the building. And there are Gillray satirical prints on the walls, of the extremes of fashion, the fops, and ‘Monstrosities of 1824’.
And an innovation I found on the menu – a seafood platter, in addition to the standard fare. I can imagine the Brothers being a bit worried about that. Have to watch how it goes. Crab in Merthyr Tydfil is traditionally a bit funeral tea-ish, and has to do with . . . . mussels and cockles and whelks . . . . I mean, in the valleys, they’re a bit careful. But most Bernis do scampi. People like scampi, like people like steak and you can’t go wrong. But do people want these whelks and fancy dishes? Get a chef in, and you’ll finish up with trout and mustard and then we’ll all be in a pickle.
There is a corner of every British town, it seems sometimes, that is forever Berni: a brightly lit, olde worlde façade where good value all-inclusive meals are available in plush surrounding that belie the price. Ray Gosling, a life-long fan of Berni Inns, tries to convey the taste of success.
MY FRIEND John is a bachelor, and like many people who live alone for ten years or so, he’s become a fair cook. We wanted to go out to eat, and he wouldn’t have a tandoori, or a kebab.
First we went to a trendy ‘English” peppermint-parlour type of new place where all the waitresses look like Mary Quant, and the waiters wear day-glo short trousers, and the walls are chromium and mirrors and blown up photographs of Humphrey Bogart and the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, but we just had a drink.
Then we went to a Berni and the steak was good. Give credit where credit is due. It was plain, thick and juicy. No sauce: no spice, but I must say, we both polished our plates.
Berni Inns are the largest licensed catering chain in England (probably in the world outside the USA). There’s more than a gross of them. They offer the same standard fare from Dublin to the Boat and Bottle in Norfolk; from Hope Street, Glasgow, to the Tudor Tavern, Canterbury, and The Grand on Plymouth Hoe (where Drake played bowls). Some are hotels where you can stay. Most are restaurants with bars.
The chain is a West Country forging, and for those not acquainted with British tradition the Bernis are very British. Not exactly roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but they make up for it in other ways. For all their Italian sounding name, Berni are Italian-Britons – who while not exactly being one of the families Julius Caesar left behind, do have a long pedigree. They’re British as Mountbatten or Marks and Spencer: and they operate a similar ‘up to the top’ patriotism and quality control.
Maybe that’s why Berni Brothers are often maligned by sophisticates and ultra-traditionalists, because they turn a pub into restaurants (plural) where Auntie Maud and the children can be sure the steak will be thick and the children half price. Usually cooked in front of them. You’ll be made to feel at ease, at home – never silly in a Berni – and the lavatories, will be clean-o. ‘Bland’, I believe, is the word of the maligners.
Within their limited menu, Berni are predictable and good value. They seem to hit on a happy medium, as my friend John finds. He has a plain mouth Berni can satisfy – at value for money prices. That means, an outlay of perhaps £4 or £5 a head for a complete meal based on duck, or plaice, or a steak that is consistently good, and served with a smile. Not too smarmy, but always there. I think Berni must have a secret farmhouse south of Merthyr Tydfil where they teach their waitresses smiling.
The Berni forebears came from Italy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras, to sell ice-cream from hand carts in South Wales when the valleys were winning rich seams of anthracite and the Welsh so busy with their black diamonds and singing in chapel. The Italians sold limeade for clearing miners’ throats and a ha’putth of snow (gelati) for the children. The Welsh were very good customers, and when the ice cream cornet season finished, the Italian pedlars doubled up with a mobile chip van.
I suppose they could have done spaghetti or macaroni cheese, but they didn’t. And soon they had seven day cafes – ‘Bracchi shops’, they’re still called in the valleys – after a Signor Bracchi who had one of the first. They married, had many children, brought their women over, and spread themselves in the fullness of time to coastal resorts – and as for the secrets of who really owns what, only Momma knows.
How they survived the 1939-45 war is another story, but many (not all) did. These Italians today are in every town south from the chocolate shop in Tain, the Glenmorangie distillery capital of Easter Ross, to the sundae bars of Eastbourne. Most of them are small-ish family concerns but some – Berni and Forte especially – are very, very big business.
Like Mountbatten, and similar to Billy Butlin, and the Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, the paradox of the Berni breed is they’re more British than British. They are unlike the post-war Italians who came to the big cities and opened pizzeria and trattoria.
In Berni, there’s no continental ambiance; no foreign phrase book is needed beyond Beaujolais. No fancy indoor plants, no oozing cake trolley – it’s cheese and biscuits to finish. Or ice cream. And a cup of coffee extra or, the Berni speciality, a glass of coffee. Mexican coffee, gaelic coffee, Drambuie coffee – every sort of coffee, but tea only by request.
The Berni success began in 1931, when Momma Berni died and left two sons, Frank and Aldo, £150 each, with which they opened a restaurant in Exeter.
By 1939 they had three, including one in Bristol, destroyed by war-time fire. And then gradually, and partly as a result of a trip the USA, they came upon the idea of the ‘steak bar’. Funny, that the steak bar had to be invented. Or to be more precise, its marketing had to be created.
The first one. The Tummer, in Bristol again, had been a pub since 1241. Rebuilt in 1565, and it looks it. Its guests had included Elizabeth I and William III. It had been terminus for the mail coach from 1784 until God’s Wonderful Railway, the GWR, arrived.
In 1956, Berni converted The Rummer to a fixed item, fixed price menu using simple foods, and cooking them plainly and superbly well. Just British meat and British drink: the only frill was in the printing of the menu. It was a huge success. And in Bristol, too - a town of so many fine, plain and fancy restaurants, and hard back bookshops, and a local population which, they say, sleeps with one eye open.
More in Bristol followed – the half timbered Llandoger Trow pub, where Alexander Selkirk met Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe was born. That was converted – and in 1964 Berni went national, and in 1970 merged to become a division of Grand Metropolitan, but still headquartered in Bristol.
Now another thing Bristol’s famous for is being shipshape: Bristol fashion. And it’s the wine port, but the Bernis, remembering Aunt Maud from the Rhondda and the Ebbw and the Taff, did they invest heavily in Chianti? No. The Bernis put in every restaurant an aperitif bar, with polished wooden casks of draught sherry and Bristol Milk. They ‘invented’ an extra large measure of the stuff: ‘the schooner’. Waitresses were trained to say: ‘Would you like a glass or a schooner, Madam?’ Oh, I don’t know, Maud was supposed to reply. What would you recommend?
Gastronomes help up their hands in horror – but it’s slipped down a treat with Auntie Maud and John sipping a schooner of sherry (or port) before a meal. It settles any collywobbles (nerves). Good for agoraphobics – it’s the Berni second special feature.
Of course they also sell bottled beer and spirits, and Guinness, and there’s a wine list.
There are usually no more than eight items on a Berni menu – steak, poultry or fish. And they are controlled. Two vegetables: mushrooms or side salad extra. It’s not true they count the number of peas per plate – but the do pride themselves on ‘portion-control and the ‘de-skilled’ preparation of food’. In other words, the chef (grill-boy in tall chef’s hat) shouldn’t have any gristle or fat to cut away. The Organisation have ‘their man’ watching the butcher, the abbatoir, the farmer – it’s quality control, Marks and Spencer style.
And in traditional surroundings. If the pub they bought wasn’t ‘olde’ enough, Berni will make it so. ‘Veneer it up’, that’s what their critics say. Then the meal will be real – but the Tudor can be phoney frills and furbelows. To some extent, the critics are right – but ‘most people’ prefer wood and plush to plastic and chrome – and a frilly table lamp shade is nice. And what would you expect on the walls of the Red Lion. Market Place, Doncaster, but prints of St Leger winners? Or the Berni at Tattenham Corner, Epsom Downs?
Berni have tried to buy old property of architectural and historic interest. They name every bar a separate restaurant, and add an extension, stain any new beams black, and point up the ‘character’ – but what’s wrong with that? What would you do with The Tudor, St Albans (a fine architectural piece); or The Tudor Tavern, Taunton (with ghost), or The Mitre, Oxford (1320) or the Wolsey Tavern, Leicester? And the Hole in the Wall, back in Bristol. In the days of the ‘press-gang’, Long John Silver was the landlord, and Robert Louis Stevenson is supposed to have written Treasure Island, in one go. I heard, in the room upstairs. A fine story – no writer would ever believe, out of jealousy. Today it has two Berni restaurants, the aperitif bar, and also a real ale bar.
The New Inn, Gloucester, has a really fine, old fashioned (genuine) coaching yard. It was one of the only two places where the tragic Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England. The Berni manager has now put an old coach in the courtyard.
In the Imperial, Widemarsh Street, Hereford, the manager, dressed as all Berni’s managers are in black jacket and striped trousers, has framed an almost life size photo of a big prize bull, just before you turn into the Pedigree Bar.
Some would say Berni don’t make enough of their historical properties. No little booklets (yet). No picture outside the Black Boy, Nottingham – and what would it be? England’s first black magistrate? Or didn’t they call the Restoration monarch Charles II ‘black boy’ – that’s less controversial, but what did he have to do with Nottingham? I’ve forgotten. I wonder – The Oliver, Bath – do Berni serve the celebrated Bath Oliver water biscuit as a treat? Maybe not. At one eating out critic wrote . . . ‘ Food is good and plentiful, and being a Berni Inn, there are no unpleasant surprises . . .’
But they are very customer sensitive. With expansion, they’re getting more discreet, less garish, more inventive, less all-the-same and obvious. Their latest acquisition is the Royal at Weston super Mare, where I went for lunch – and gosh it was good. They’ve done up the rooms, with the original high ceilings, absolutely delightfully, in softer pastel shades, more Queen Anne than Tudor, as befits the building. And there are Gillray satirical prints on the walls, of the extremes of fashion, the fops, and ‘Monstrosities of 1824’.
And an innovation I found on the menu – a seafood platter, in addition to the standard fare. I can imagine the Brothers being a bit worried about that. Have to watch how it goes. Crab in Merthyr Tydfil is traditionally a bit funeral tea-ish, and has to do with . . . . mussels and cockles and whelks . . . . I mean, in the valleys, they’re a bit careful. But most Bernis do scampi. People like scampi, like people like steak and you can’t go wrong. But do people want these whelks and fancy dishes? Get a chef in, and you’ll finish up with trout and mustard and then we’ll all be in a pickle.