Restaurant - Types

Types

Restaurants range from unpretentious lunching or dining places catering to people working nearby, with simple food served in simple settings at low prices, to expensive establishments serving refined food and wines in a formal setting. In the former case, customers usually wear casual clothing. In the latter case, depending on culture and local traditions, customers might wear semi-casual, semi-formal, or formal wear.

Typically, customers sit at tables, their orders are taken by a waiter, who brings the food when it is ready, and the customers pay the bill before leaving. In finer restaurants there will be a host or hostess or even a maître d'hôtel to welcome customers and to seat them. Other staff waiting on customers includes busboy and sommeliers.

Restaurants often specialize in certain types of food or present a certain unifying, and often entertaining, theme. For example, there are seafood restaurants, vegetarian restaurants or ethnic restaurants. Generally speaking, restaurants selling food characteristic of the local culture are simply called restaurants, while restaurants selling food of foreign cultural origin may be called ethnic restaurants. But some categories of "ethnic" food are usually categorized singly. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a Tibetan and an Indian restaurant may both be thought of as "ethnic restaurants," but a French restaurant will be simply "French."

Restaurants may also be classified on the structure of their menu or the style of offering food. For example, one might choose a tapas bar, a sushi train, a tastet restaurant, a buffet restaurant or a yum cha restaurant not only for the type of cuisine but for the way it is offered.

For some time the travelling public has been catered for with ship's messes and railway restaurant cars which are, in effect, travelling restaurants. (Many railways, the world over, also cater for the needs of travellers by providing Raiway Refreshment Rooms at railway stations.) In recent times there has been a trend to create a number of travelling restaurants, specifically designed for tourists. These can be found on such diverse places as trams, boats, buses, etc.