WHAT do you feel like eating tonight? A spot of Bedouin perhaps? A Greek meze? A selection of sushi or a Chinese takeaway?

Perhaps you'd prefer a curry - but will it be Indian, Nepalese, Himalayan or Thai?

If you live in Bournemouth, gone are the days when eating out was just a simple matter of choosing between the local Italian or the nearest curry house.

In fact, in modern-day Britain as a whole, you don't have to travel the world to dine around the globe.

This week Microsoft website MSN revealed the results of a survey to find out which cities in Britain offer the most different types of cuisine.

The Frequency of Overseas Dishes survey named Nottingham as the new international culinary capital of the UK, with six restaurants representing different world cuisines in every square mile.

The survey also found that curry fans in Nottingham can visit a different Indian restaurant every month for the next three years.

Glasgow has been named Britain's Little Italy with more Italian restaurants per square mile than anywhere else in the UK - a legacy from the 1920s when vast numbers of Italian immigrants arrived in Scotland.

And Southampton has been hailed as the country's traditional food capital because of the huge number of fish and chip shops in the city.

So how does the conurbation of Bournemouth and Poole compare with the 20 UK cities examined in the survey?

Take a look in the Bournemouth Yellow Pages and you'll find more than 20 different types of restaurant, offering everything from Mexican to Malaysian and Moroccan.

Multicultural Charminster offers the most eclectic mix, with Bedouin, Spanish, Lebanese and Brazilian restaurants to name a few.

And elsewhere you can take your pick from Arabic, American, Japanese, Singaporean, French, Greek, vegetarian, Thai, Turkish or Portuguese, plus plenty of traditional English fish and chip takeaways, seafood restaurants and even an authentic pie and mash shop.

Beverly Ware, spokesperson for Bournemouth Tourism, says: "More than 100 restaurants to suit all tastes and pockets await the diner in Bournemouth.

"Over 72,000 international students from all over the world visit Bournemouth each year to study and have done for years. They have brought their vibrant cuisines with them and restaurants have popped up all over the town, which makes a wonderful offer to residents and visitors."

David Ryan, head chef at the Norfolk Royale Hotel and chairman of the Bournemouth and Poole Chefs' Forum, agrees.

He says: "We have quite a wide variety of different cuisines and different eating styles in this area. For example you can go down Old Christchurch Road and you can have Italian, Greek, Chinese, Indian - that's quite a good spread, isn't it?

"This is multicultural Britain and we've got such an appetite for trying different foods, depending on what mood we're in.

"I still don't think we're as diverse as London here - we haven't got Peruvian, for example - but the more outrageous the cuisine the more popular it is, and there's always room in the market for more."

Andy Price, chairman of the Bournemouth Tourism Action Group and member of the town's Hospitality Excellence Group, argues that while the town has plenty of restaurants, it would benefit from more diversity.

Mr Price, who also owns West Beach - named by the AA as Best Seafood Restaurant in England 2005 - says: "Bournemouth has a big variety of restaurants but there's more that we could do in terms of different international cuisine and classic cuisine like brasseries and bistros.

"We're the second biggest provincial town in the UK, with five million visitors a year and a generic population of 375,000, and I think we probably should have a bigger offer - but that's happening."

He adds: "The award for West Beach is great because it's the first award the town has had in terms of cuisine - most of these awards seem to go to Cornwall and Devon.

"We have some great seafront restaurants and we just need really to get good town-centre venues now.

"We've got the Exeter Road development of 14 restaurants which are all national brands, and there's a lot of other developments in the pipeline.

"There's no doubt that Bournemouth has the potential to become one of the gastronomic provincial capitals of the country."

Don't miss our Taste supplement every Monday in your Daily Echo