200px|thumb|alt=text|The Berni Inn logo
Berni Inn was a chain of British steakhouses established in 1955 by brothers Frank and Aldo Berni, who modelled the chain on restaurants they had seen in America. The restaurants introduced the postwar British public to its own home-grown restaurant chain, which came with stylised restaurants with Tudor-looking false oak beams and white walls.
By 1970 the chain comprised 147 hotels and restaurants, including the New Inn at Gloucester, the Mitre at Oxford and several in Japan. It was the largest food chain outside the US. More outlets were opened, and the company went public in 1962.
The first female manager was Gerda Thut, who took over The Sawyer's Arms in Nottingham in the 1960s. This was noted as a progressive step in management and equality. The chain was sold to Grand Metropolitan for £14.5 million in 1970. Their brother Marco managed Harvey's Restaurant in Bristol in the 1960s.
Fare
The most frequently ordered meal, even as late as the 1980s, was prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gateau. This is sometimes called the Great British Meal. As Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham note in their 1997 book The Prawn Cocktail Years, "cooked as it should be, this much derided and often ridiculed dinner is still something very special indeed".