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The meanings of the word 'bar' in British English

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The meanings of the word 'bar' in British English

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The area in a hotel or other public place where alcoholic drinks are sold and drunk.
The counter in a pub where you go to get your drinks.
A place in the centre of a town or city similar to a pub in general purpose, but which serves a greater choice of wines than the typical pub (some are even known as 'wine bars') and usually looks unashamedly modern. Indeed, these bars are a relatively recent phenomenon.
The different rooms in a pub. This is an outdated meaning which you may find used in books about life in Britain before the 1980s, when pubs has two distinct kinds of room. The 'public bar' had hard seats, bare floorboards, a dart board and other pub games and was typically used by the working class. The 'saloon bar', on the other hand, was typically used by the middle class. Here there was a carpet on the floor, softer seats and the drinks were a little more expensive. Some pubs also had a 'private bar', which was even more exclusive.

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As well as large amounts of hot drinks such as tea, coffee and hot chocolate, British people - especially children - drink squash ( a sweetened fruit concentrate that has to be diluted with water) and brand-name 'soft' (non-alcoholic) drinks. They also expect to be able to drink water straight from the tap.
Before the 1960s, wine was drunk only by the higher social classes and was associated in most people's minds with expensive restaurants. Since that time, it has increased enormously in popularity.
Beer is still the most popular alcoholic drink. The most popular kind of pub beer is usually known as 'bitter', which is draught (from the barrel). A sweeter, darker version of bitter is 'mild'. Conventionally, these beers (which are often known as 'ales') should be drunk at room temperature, although many pubs now serve them chilled. They have a comparatively low alcoholic content. This is one reason why people are able to drink so much of them! In most pubs, several kinds of bottled beer are also available.
Beer which is closer to continental European varieties is known as 'larger'. During the 1980s, strong lager became popular among some young people who, because they were used to weaker traditional beer, sometimes drank too much of it and became aggressive. They became known as 'lager louts'.
In some pubs, cider is available on draught, and in some parts of Britain, most typically in the English west country, it is this, and not beer, which is the most common pub drink.
Shandy is half beer and half fizzy lemonade. It has the reputation of being very good for quenching thirst.

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Tea made its first appearance in Britain some 350 years ago and by the end of the seventeenth century tea-drinking was well established. However, during the eighteenth century, its growing popularity was halted by the breweries who, concerned by this competition, successfully lobbied for a series of tax rises on all tea imports. It was only in nineteenth-century Britain that polite society's ritual of afternoon tea was born.
For most of the twentieth century, tea reigned supreme in Britain. To this day, 'standard' (black) tea, served strong and with milk, remains an indispensable aspect of most British households. However, it is in slow decline. This started in the 1970s, when it first saw serious competition from fizzy soft drinks. It continued in the 1990s, when bottled water became popular, and continues today with the increasing popularity of green tea and herbal teas. And through all this time, coffee has been gradually on the rise. In town centres, the number of 'tea rooms' has fallen while the number of cafes specializing in coffee has risen.
These days, sales of coffee are larger than those of standard tea. However, the British tea industry can proudly point to the fact that tea still accounts for a third of all liquid refreshment taken in Britain - far more than any other drink. In fact, there is a sense in which the industry's problem is a result of standard black tea's absolutely central place in British habits. It is regarded as a basic staple, so that British consumers expect to be able to buy it in supermarkets very cheaply.

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Again, generalizations are dangerous. Below is described what everybody knows about - but this is not necessarily what everybody does!
Breakfast is usually a packeted 'cereal' (e.g. cornflakes) and/or toast and marmalade. People do not usually eat a 'traditional' British breakfast.
Elevenses is, conventinally, a cup of tea and biscuits at around 11 a.m. In fact, people have tea or coffee and biscuits whenever they feel like it. This is usually quite often. (There is a vast range of biscuits on offer in even a small supermarket, far more than other countries.)
Lunch is typically at 1 p.m. but it is often a bit earlier for schoolchildren and those who start work at 8 a.m. Traditionally, Sunday lunch is an important meal when the family sits down together. But in fact only ten percent of the British population now does this.
Tea for the urban working class (and a wider section of the population in Scotland and Ireland) is the evening meal, eaten as soon as people get home from work (at around 6 p.m.). For other classes, it means a cup of tea and a snack at around 4 p.m.
Supper is a word for the evening meal used by some of the people who do not call it 'tea'.
Dinner is the other word for the evening meal. It suggests a later time than 'tea'. The word is also used in connection with a special meal, as when friends are invited for a 'dinner party'. Many people talk about 'Christmas dinner', even if they have it in the middle of the day. The same word is also sometimes used to refer to the midday meal in schools, which is served by 'dinner ladies'.

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Because Britain is full of individualists and people from different cultures, generalizations are dangerous. However, the following distinctive features may be noted:
A 'fry up' is a phrase used informally to denote several items fried together. The most common items are eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, and even (fried) bread. It is not generally accompanied by 'chips' (the normal British word for French fried potatoes). The British eat rather a lot of fried food.
Although it is sometimes poetically referred to as 'the staff of life', bread is not an accompaniment to every meal. It is most commonly eaten, with butter and almost anything else, for a snack, either as a sandwich or as toast ( a British household regards toasting facilities as a basic necessity). This may explain why sliced bread is the most popular type. On the other hand, the British use a lot of flour for making pastry dishes, both savoury and sweet, calles pies, and for making cakes.
Eggs are a basic part of most people's diet. If they are not fried, they are either soft-boiled and eaten directly out of their shells with a spoon, or hard-boiled (so that they can be eaten with the fingers or put into sandwiches).
Cold meats are not very popular. In a small supermarket, you can find a large variety of cheeses, but perhaps only one kind of ham and no salami at all. To many British people, preserved meats are typically 'continental'.
It is common in most households for a family meal to finish with a prepared sweet dish. This is called either 'pudding', 'sweet', or 'dessert' (class distinctions are involved here). There is a great variety of well-known dishes for this purpose, many of which are hot (often a pie for some sort). In fact, the British love 'sweets' (plural) generally, by which they mean both all kinds of chocolate and also what the Americans call 'candy'.
They also love crisps (what the Americans call 'chips'). A market research report in 2005 found that they eat more than all the rest of Western Europe put together.

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British food can sometimes taste bland because it does not make use of many spices. Perhaps this is one reason why Indian restaurants are so popular in Britain. It is a cliche of British life that, after a heavy drinking session in the pub, a group of British people often decide to 'go for an Indian'. There, some of the men in the group will display their macho credentials by ordering 'the hottest thing on the menu' (that is, the dish with the hottest spices).
The British Asian comedy Goodness Gracious Me once used this cliche for one of its most famous sketches, in which a drunken group of Asians 'go for an English' (meaning 'go to an English restaurant') and one of them displays his macho credentials by ordering 'the blandest thing on the menu'.

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People say horrible things about British food. So it was something of a shock when, in 2005, an international panel of more than 600 chefs, food critics and restaurateurs named no less than fourteen British restaurants in the world's top 50.
Number one on the list was The Fat Duck in Berkshire (between London and Oxford). This is the restaurant which introduced the world to such delicacies as sardine-on-toast sorbet, bacon and egg ice cream, snail porridge and orange and beetroot jelly. With a menu like this, British food does not look so boring after all!
However, not too much can be read into this British culinary victory. The panel of experts did not consider price as a criterion. Their top 50 were all restaurants far beyond the pockets of most people and thus had nothing to do with their everyday experience of food.