jayneandmarty.com

There’s an ad on Bay FM every 15 minutes broadcasting the various winners of this year’s Telstra Golden Plate awards (a bit like the Good Food Guide). The ad mentions the winners in various categories: best cafe, best restaurant, best brasserie, best bistro. Okay, but what’s the difference? Our combined 10+ years of hospitality experience couldn’t answer the question.

Wikipedia doesn’t help much:

• A restaurant is an establishment that serves prepared food and beverages to order, to be consumed on the premises. The term covers a multiplicity of venues and a diversity of styles of cuisine.
• A brasserie is a cafe doubling as a restaurant and serving single dishes and other meals in a relaxed setting.
• A bistro is a familiar name for a cafe serving moderately priced simple meals in an unpretentious setting.
• There are two types of cafes: those that specialize in coffee and hot beverages, and those with a full menu.

To me, brasserie and bistro sound like the same thing. Also, they’re both cafes. And restaurants.

About the only thing I can determine is that high-end restaurants that serve fancy meals in a more formal setting are definitely NOT brasseries, bistros or cafes.

Apart from that, everything else is technically the same thing. So we’re still in the dark.