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,   and  Melissa Blease
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‘I wish, I want to, I must’: eating out in 1970s Liverpool

Kirkland’s: the place that started Liverpool’s eating-out revolution. Credit: Kirkland Wine Bar

Before Instagram, the city dined on word-of-mouth

It’s 1973 and I should be having a lovely time. Aged nine, I don’t get invitations to parties; I don’t have any friends. But now the clouds have parted: whether out of kindness or obligation, Philippa-Jane Arrowsmith-Harte has invited me to her birthday party at the Berni Inn on the Pier Head, and we’re going there straight from school, the school being Beechenhurst on Menlove Avenue which, for a very short time, I fitted into as badly as I did my sister’s hand-me-downs (one of which I’m wearing today: a party dress that makes me look like a velvet-clad balloon). 

Several of us are chauffeured to our destination in the Arrowsmith-Hartes’ cigar smoke-filled, bottle-green Rover Saloon. “Here we are, ladies: the River Room!” Pippa’s dad announces when we arrive. And there it is: a concrete box with windows, perched on top of what might have been a shopping arcade or a bus terminal, the large red Berni Inn logo not quite managing to break up the austere, utilitarian countenance.

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