Berni Inns opened their first outlet 70 years ago this week and would go on to become a great Bristol success story, and one which would revolutionise the eating habits of the whole country. Eugene Byrne , our man devouring Black Forest Gateau with his hands, reports.
Seventy years ago, restaurants were posh. It wasn’t just that you needed money to eat in them, you also needed the sort of social confidence that most people simply didn’t have. You might live in a nice house where the main breadwinner had a well-paid managerial job, but eating in restaurants could still be out of the question if you weren’t schooled in the finer behavioural norms of Britain’s rigid class system.
You’d be afraid that the waiters would look down their noses at you, terrified that you’d order the wrong kind of wine to go with your meal or that other diners would disapprove of your table-manners.
And what on earth were all those things with French names on the menu? My God, you might end up ordering frogs’ legs or snails by mistake!
No, definitely not worth the trouble.
Cafés and ice cream parlours were no problem, but restaurants were strictly for the upper crust. And fine dining, it was understood, was usually about French cuisine.
There’s a history to be written about the revolution in Bristol’s eating-out habits that have taken place since the 1950s – the popularity of curry and pizza houses in the 1960s and 70s, to the explosion in restaurants from a whole world’s worth of food cultures in the 1980s and 90s. All of this made Bristol one of the leading gastronomic centres in England, so now the only fear that restaurants hold for us is fear of the bill.
That revolution started with an Italian family in Bristol in the 1950s, and they didn’t just change Bristol’s dining culture – they did it for the whole country. Their success burned brightly and brilliantly for a few decades.
Frank (1903-2000) and Aldo (1909-1997) Berni came from a small village in the Apennine mountains of northern Italy where they would go to school on skis in winter.
Theirs was a family of natural-born entrepreneurs. The only problem was that the businesses they built up through hard work and talent ended up being wrecked by wars.
Frank and Aldo’s grandfather, Francesco Berni, had been a partner in a famous international circus. Then the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 came along; the circus got caught in the Siege of Paris, and the circus animals were all eaten by starving Parisians.
Unbowed, Francesco moved to South Wales; this was a time and place where religious people and socialists alike – and plenty of people in late Victorian Wales were both – regarded drink as the curse of the working classes. So he set up a chain of “temperance bars” which did not stock alcohol, but did sell ice-cream, sweets, cakes, tea and coffee and tobacco – just the thing for a family treat for a God-fearing coal miner with a few shillings to spare.
This business prospered, and Francesco was joined by his son Louis – Frank and Aldo’s father. But then the First World War came along and supplies of milk and sugar were increasingly hard to obtain. Many people had money, but the temperance bars were unable to meet demand.
Frank and Aldo, and possibly also their brother Marco, arrived in Ebbw Vale in the late 1920s where the business had barely recovered, and was now hit by the Depression.
Frank Berni, 1962(Image: Bristol Post)
In search of better prospects they left the valleys and with the £300 legacy they had been left when their mother died, they opened a café in Exeter, then another in Plymouth. By 1938 they had one in Bristol, at 68 Queens Road. This was quite a smart place in its day, aimed at a well-to-do clientele. It didn’t serve alcohol, but it did have a music licence.
When Italy declared war on Britain in 1940 Frank and Marco – who was now running a business of his own – were interned as enemy aliens. Then the Plymouth and Exeter cafés were destroyed by German bombing, while the Bristol Blitz saw the Queens Road one damaged by fire.
Aldo remained at liberty as he had a British passport, but was ordered to work full time at an agricultural nursery near Bristol in lieu of military service. Somehow he managed to do this and keep the Bristol café going before his brothers, who were never any kind of security threat, were released. Frank and Aldo acquired Hort’s Restaurant not long afterwards.
Aldo Berni in 1963(Image: Mirrorpix)
It’s hard now to grasp what a grand institution Hort’s was back then. Originally in Small Street before moving to Broad Street in the 1920s, it was Bristol’s smartest restaurant, and strictly for the upper crust. This was the first place in the city to serve the racy new American invention, cocktails, in the 20s. By the 1930s it was being run by sisters Annie and Bessie Hort, the latter continuing to run it after Annie died before deciding to sell up and retire. The Bernis’ acquisition meant that they had arrived at the pinnacle of Bristol’s catering business. This was probably also their first outlet with an alcohol licence.
Soon they had other restaurants in Gloucester and South Wales and when the Caterers Association sent a delegation to America on a fact-finding tour in 1947, Frank Berni must have been the obvious choice for Bristol’s representative.
On his return he told the Bristol press that he didn’t think much of American food. Yes, there was plenty of it, much more so than in Britain, where everything was still rationed, but he found it bland and lacking in taste. We can do better, he said.
What had impressed him, though, was the way in which American steak houses, low-cost restaurants catering for a family market, operated, making money through careful cost control.
It would be some years yet before food rationing completely ended in the UK, but when it did the Bernis seized their chance. When they learned that the lease on the Rummer in St Nicholas Market was up for grabs, they snapped it up and set about refurbishing what was Bristol’s oldest pub.
The original Berni, the Rummer in the mid-1980s. By then the Berni brothers had withdrawn from the business(Image: Bristol Post)
It had been old even when Coleridge and Wordsworth were hanging out there in the 1790s … When the workmen moved in they found themselves scraping off layers of paint up to half an inch thick.
The Rummer re-opened on June 27 1956 as the first in what would become Berni Inns, offering steak, chips, a roll and butter followed by ice cream for seven shillings and sixpence (37½p).
It was an instant hit, and the brothers rapidly expanded their empire across the region, and across the country. Britain, sick of rationing, sick of its dreary, bland post-war diet, went absolutely mad for steak and chips.
By the early 1960s the firm was opening a new restaurant every month; they especially liked turning historic pubs into Berni Inns. In Bristol their outlets would eventually also include the Hole in the Wall and the Llandoger Trow, among others.
The Llandoger Trow in 1961; it became a Berni Inn the following year after extensive work to shore up the building’s foundations. We strongly suspect that many of the pirate legends about the pub were promoted by Bernis’ PR department(Image: Copyright Unknown – Public Domain)
(Added to this, they had a very slick marketing and advertising operation. BT can’t prove this, but we’re 99% certain that the myths about the two pubs’ connections with Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe were popularised by Bernis’ PR people. These myths had been around before the brothers were born, but only very occasionally mentioned, and never taken seriously.)
By the 1960s, Berni Inns was the biggest restaurant chain outside the USA. At one point there was even a Berni in Japan.
Their profitability was based on the brothers’ experience, and by what Frank had seen in America. There was a simple set menu and the kitchens only needed a grill and a deep fat fryer. Staff did not need to be highly skilled; the only person who mattered was the manager, who worked from a detailed operations manual known as “The Bible”.
The classic 1970s Berni Inns logo(Image: Copyright Unknown – Public Domain)
They saved on the laundry bill by using place mats instead of tablecloths. They kept a very careful eye on the quality of their steaks, which was strictly controlled by weight (an idea apparently borrowed from the prison system). The grills operated at temperatures much higher than a domestic cooker, meaning the meat was sealed instantly and was therefore juicier.
By 1977, Bernis were serving 21 million meals a year – 63 per cent of them steak – and employing 6,000 people, all controlled from their head office at the Pithay.
Bernis’ also boosted profits with alcohol. They gave new life to Bristol’s historic sherry industry by introducing their famous “schooners” – a whole eighth of a bottle, served from a big barrel. You could end off your meal with an “Irish Coffee” laced with whiskey, or “French Coffee” with brandy.
From courting couples to business meetings, to birthday or anniversary celebrations … a meal in a Berni Inn, on red plush seating in some quintessentially old English pub was an occasion. The staff weren’t intimidating, no-one would look down their noses as your drinks choices, nothing on the menu was in French. And if there was a problem you were positively encouraged to complain.
A 1970s Bristol newspaper advert (complete with outdated sexist theme)(Image: Bristol Post (Image recovered from newsprint using Gemini AI))
Berni Inns were for everyone, and a trip to one was within the financial reach of most. Fifty years ago, you could get a 10oz rump with salad and chips or jacket potato, followed by cheese, ice cream or apple pie for £3.35. Think of that as around £25 today.
The Bernis also pioneered another dish that became hugely popular – chicken in a basket. It was widely copied, especially by pubs. Until the 1970s few pubs in Britain served food (unless you count pickled eggs and bags of crisps), but when some of them started to experiment, chicken in a basket (then scampi in a basket), plus chips, became favourites alongside the even easier-to-produce Ploughman’s Lunch.
(Whatever happened to chicken in a basket? Anyone know if there are any places still around where you can get it?)
“To achieve success in catering you’ve got to know the industry,” said Aldo some years later. “But it’s luck that enables you to hit on the right thing at the right time.”
The brothers became millionaires when the company went public in 1962. Eight years later the chain was sold for £14.5m to Grand Metropolitan, whose Schooner Inns were soon digested by the Berni brand.
Frank and Aldo remained on the Grand Met board for a while, but had effectively retired from business. With the growth in foreign travel and a more sophisticated public palate, the Berni format was beginning to look dated by the 1980s.
By then, Berni Inns were being seen by many as tacky and unfashionable – naff. The classic Berni three-course meal – prawn cocktail starter, steak & chips main and Black Forest gateau for dessert – had become a cliché and was losing its appeal.
The classic Berni menu, recreated for the Rummer in 2015(Image: Dan Regan – Bristol Post)
When the chain was sold to Whitbread in 1995 the inns became Beefeater Pubs and the Berni name vanished for ever.
By then, both men had long since retired. Frank, the company chairman, had been the quiet one, the one in charge of the figures and the cost control. He and his wife Lina, herself from a Welsh-Italian family, had moved to Jersey in 1970.
Aldo, the more extrovert of the two, remained in Bristol and called himself a proud Bristolian. He and his wife Esme lived in a surprisingly modest bungalow in Clifton and he was often to be seen driving around town in his Rolls-Royce or his Bentley.
Marco Berni, the third brother, had also long settled in Bristol and was a sort of semi-detached member of the business. Older readers might remember Marco’s Trattoria on Queens Road in Clifton, launched in 1965 as an Italian-style Berni Inn. Marco would later become manager of the very prestigious Harvey’s Restaurant on Denmark Street, which was not connected to Berni Inns at all.
As the unofficial head of a large extended family to which he was devoted, Aldo Berni gave much of his fortune away to family members, and much of it also to his Bristol-born wife Esme, who he had met here during the War.
When she died in 1995 she left most of her £4.5m estate to the Bristol & District Branch of Animal Concern and its Holly Hedge Animal Sanctuary.
And much as a new generation might have scorned prawn cocktail and Black Forest gateau, these two men had brought about a revolution, bringing affordable and decent-quality dining-out to the British masses.