It is enough to make the heart - not to mention the stomach - swell with pride. According to a European lifestyle survey by the Wall Street Journal, we in Britain go out to eat more often than the residents of any other northern European country, including France. Apparently 71% of us eat out more than once a month. So here's the important question, the one that matters: if we eat out more than everyone else, why are we so sodding bad at it? Why do we put up with so much grim food served by so many lousy waiters in such dismal surroundings?
Cue howls of indignation: are we not now in the teeth of a food revolution? Are things not improving at a rate of knots? Well, yes, they are, and we shall get to all those good things presently. But however many column inches and television hours are dedicated to the remarkable things occurring in some professional kitchens, we cannot ignore the underlying situation, which is, for the most part, still pretty dire.
Take the black country in the West Midlands. (Really! Take it. Keep it.) My wife's family is from the black country. I have visited the area three or four times a year for more than 15 years, and I have not once had a meal there that I would class as good. I have, though, had a lot of meals there that I would class as bad. Very, very bad. There are the dismal cafe lunches and the dreary golf-club lunches. And then there was the Dry Dock.
The Dry Dock is a pub in Netherton, which is not the arsehole of the world, but it's bloody close. I went to the Dry Dock because, as a restaurant critic for a national newspaper, I thought it my responsibility to find something - damn it, anything - in the black country worth reviewing. The Dry Dock is owned by the Little Pub Company, which, in the past, has been famous for its Desperate Dan pies: huge steak and kidney creations served under a golden pastry dome with little comedy pastry horns.
Now a good steak pie is a thing of beauty. Done well, it is a classic. Done badly, it is gastronomic torture, and at the Dry Dock, now under new ownership, it was done very badly indeed. After eating it I didn't just want to wash the taste from my mouth; I wanted counselling.
I mention it now for two reasons. The first is that it was truly a hateful experience, and I won't pass up an opportunity to give the Dry Dock a kicking. The second is that it flags up the acute problem with that 71% statistic: nearly three-quarters of us may well go out to eat more than once a month, but that tells us nothing about what we're putting in our mouths when we get there. Certainly, we're not splashing out because, according to the same survey, 84% of Britons spend only £21 or less when they eat out. That puts us just ahead of the Americans in the cheapskate tables, and well behind the Italians, the Belgians and the Dutch.
I have no doubt that this is true. Close to where I live in south London is a pub that advertises a 20oz T-bone steak at £7.95, and apparently they do a good trade. Clearly some people see that price tag and think: bargain! Me? I think: so which decade did the cow die in exactly? And what of? TB?
As I've already said, not everything is gloom and doom; there are some very good things going on in Britain's restaurant sector, and they are worth examining because they also tell us quite a lot about what's going wrong. For a start, the gastronomic end of the business is healthier than it has ever been, with serious chefly talents such as Claude Bosi and Heston Blumenthal, Marcus Wearing, Tom Aikens and Shane Osborne coming to maturity. This top end of the trade is also surprisingly good value. The standard £65 charged at Gordon Ramsay's three-starred flagship London restaurant may sound like a lot, but it is remarkable value compared to the price of dinner in any of the French Michelin three-starred restaurants.
Several notches below that is the pub-restaurant movement, which Matthew Fort has done so much to champion in this newspaper. As a result of the then Tory government's decision in the early 1990s to restrict the number of tied pubs that any brewery could own to 2,000, enterprising young chefs have been able to buy up rural pubs and turn them into restaurants with support from the cashflow supplied by the bar. (Curiously, this means that the Good Food Guide of today now looks very similar to the Good Food Guide of 50 years ago, with many of the good eateries outside the major conurbations being housed in pubs.) Rarely are they cheap, but they represent good value for good cooking.
The other development is the increasing sophistication of the value mid-market which, until recently, Pizza Express had to themselves. Much has been made of that company's declining fortunes in recent years - though, in the face of competition from relatively new arrivals such as Ask, Zizzi and Strada, each of which has clambered on to the same territory, I think they've held out remarkably well. The increasing competition may not have led to much culinary innovation - it's pasta, pizzas, salads, more pizzas, more pasta - but they are nice places for a relatively cheap quality meal where the word "service" means more than plate carrying.
The problem is that all of these things, while undoubtedly good, do not make for that oft-declared food revolution. Even if there are now 200 or 300 good food pubs in Britain, millions of people don't have one nearby and probably couldn't afford the cost of what is hardly a budget option. We are still a very long way from the small-town-in-the-middle-of-nowhere test: pull off a motorway in France, Italy or Spain into a small town in the middle of nowhere, and you will find at least one good place to eat. Not smart or fancy, but good. Try that in Leicestershire, Lincolnshire or Lancashire and you're odds on to starve. We lack a bedrock of good, mid-range restaurants where you can eat decently without selling your children into slavery to pay for it.
I'm regularly criticised by readers of my column for reviewing too much in London, and it's true that I do. The reason is that London has a serious restaurant culture with all the competition that implies. The moment you get outside the capital (and cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Bristol), quality becomes horribly unreliable. There's no point me going all the way to Aberdeenshire or County Durham to announce that I've found another lousy place to eat. I've done that too often already.
The other problem in Britain is the lack of an indigenous culinary culture. There are upsides to this. We are more open to different cuisines than anywhere else in Europe, as anybody who has ever tried to find good Chinese or Indian food in Düsseldorf or Siena will confirm. Our big cities have the most diverse range of restaurants in Europe. The downside is that, in a country with no agreed gastronomic roots drawn from the domestic kitchen, everything is up for grabs. No principles need apply; we become subject to the caprices of fashion more than to the demands of appetite.
As a result, ambitious young chefs, spurred on by the coverage given to the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Gary Rhodes, and the atrocities committed against innocent ingredients on Ready Steady Cook, produce food that is a curious and unsatisfying Esperanto. Some of the worst offenders are London's gastro-pubs, where ersatz Pad Thais lurk alongside underpowered gazpachos and misconceived tempuras on the same menu. But you can also find it in chain pubs which think they have to reflect our new-found cosmopolitan outlook with menus that wander the globe without a map. Personally, I think the Thai vegetarian schnitzel recently offered by one major pub chain ought to be declared illegal.
Then there are the other niggles: the outrageous and unjustified mark-ups on mediocre wines, the "discretionary" 12.5% service charge slapped on the bill (watch the reaction if you try not to pay it), and the massive prices, which reflect not the cost of ingredients or staff, but the interior designer's bill.
Can we do anything to change all of this? Yes, I think we can. We can complain more often, something the British are terribly bad at. We can refuse to pay service where it is not deserved. We can favour the good and boycott the grim. We can, in short, exercise good taste. That way, the next time someone performs one of these lifestyle surveys, we in Britain really will have something to boast about.
· Jay Rayner is the food critic for the Observer.