Canteen dining has something of an image problem; most of us will think of school dinners, with overcooked food and wet trays. Yet canteen dining was a staple of 20th-century Britain, and this way of eating took place on a mass scale outside the workplace, school or other institution, on every high street in Britain.
British Restaurants (BRs) were public dining rooms offering price-capped and nutritious meals in the 1940s and 1950s. This national feeding network was administered by the wartime Ministry of Food (MOF), which had pioneered a similar scheme, National Kitchens, during the First World War.
BRs were intended to be, by instruction of the MOF, “centres
