The Skinny Food and Drink Survey 2015

Our fourth annual Food and Drink Survey gets under way this month - here's how (and why) you should get involved

Feature by Peter Simpson | 02 Sep 2014

It’s a long-awaited vote that could have a major impact on all of our lives. It’s a historic opportunity to let the world know what you really think. It’s really, really, super important. But unlike other major votes you may have heard about, there will be beer, and cake, and burgers the size of suitcases.

Yes, time to dust off your notepads and pop on that t-shirt that’s ‘ketchup safe’ – it’s The Skinny’s annual readers’ Food and Drink Survey. This is the fourth edition of our yearly poll where we ask you – the readers of this fair magazine – to tell us where in Scotland you like to munch, slurp, booze and caffeinate.

Last year, you cast thousands of votes for dozens of your favourite food and drink spots in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, and it was a rip-roaring success. It turns out you like cafés with highly-descriptive names, bars that are all connected to one another à la The Usual Suspects, and nice comfy chairs and big sandwiches when you’re a bit hungover. All solid choices in our book, so well done.

With that in mind we’ve kept things much the same this year. We’ve broadened the survey geographically to bring Dundee back into the fold (hello Dundonians!), but also narrowed categories down to focus on the really important stuff and help you breeze through the Survey in no time at all.


cast your survey votes HERE!


Seeing as this is a public ballot and you’re all very busy people with lives to lead and people to see, we feel it’s best to pander to you for a while in order to convince you to vote in this year’s Survey, just like they do in real elections.

Firstly, we trust you. You haven’t put much of a foot wrong in the first three years of this survey, and we’ve trawled through literally thousands of your votes in that time. Even those of you who waste our time with ‘hilarious’ joke answers are alright – it wouldn’t be a Skinny Food Survey without some wise-arse writing in to impersonate a famous Scottish celebrity (it seems the trick is to end every word with an ‘h’). You take your food and drink seriously, but not too seriously, and we like that.

Plus, there are just so many of you. We do like our food and drink here at The Skinny, but there are only so many opportunities for us to bomb around from bar-to-bar perfecting our craft beer rankings. But luckily for us, there are thousands of you who each have your own favourite drinks, venues and eateries, and by mashing them all together we tend to find a list of places that pretty well sum up the best that Scottish food and drink has to offer.

Each of these places is someone’s choice, and that’s what makes this survey so great. We could tell you where to go, or what to order, or which barman to avoid eye contact with, but it’s only by collecting the thoughts of as many of the cultural community together in one place that we find out which barman you really want to avoid eye contact with.

Everyone has their own favourite places – the hidey-holes where the chairs are comfy and the drinks are good, the cafés where you feel relaxed and at ease with the world until you get up to go and find yourself sprinting home because you were so ‘at ease’ you drank three flat whites in the space of an hour. We just need to know where we’re most likely to find you reclining or buzzed up to the eyeballs on frothed milk.

So that’s your job. Cast your votes below, look out on these pages for more detail in the months ahead, follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates on the vote, and let us know where you like to do the eating and the drinking. It’s a big responsibility, this democracy lark, but we think you’re up to the challenge. You might want to take some napkins with you, though.

Get the latest on this year's food survey, and vote for your favourites in Scotland and the Northwest, at theskinny.co.uk/food