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So I'm using English for Everyone Practice Book Level 4 Advanced and on page 154, we are asked to Mark the sentence which is correct out of two options.

The two options are:

  1. It was at a restaurant in Florence where we ate the delicious steak by the river.

And

  1. It was a restaurant in Florence where we ate the delicious steak by the river.

The memo at the back of the book says the second answer is correct. I cannot for the life of me figure out why. I went through the forum looking for an answer but the answers mostly focused on "at" v "in".

Could the issue be one of emphasis?

Appreciate constructive responses on this question.

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    The total lack of context makes this impossible to answer.
    – Greybeard
    Oct 6, 2022 at 9:53
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    I would expect 'It was at a restaurant in Florence that we ate...' rather than where. Does the book not explain the issue being tested here?
    – Kate Bunting
    Oct 6, 2022 at 9:59
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    Unfortunately, no context is given. I wish I could send a picture. But the chapter starts off with using 'what' clauses to add emphasis. For example, "What I dislike is people who swear". But the next page is completely unrelated to that. This book is really random though.
    – Emmet
    Oct 6, 2022 at 10:26
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    "Where was that photo taken?" "It was at a restaurant in Florence where we ate the delicious steak by the river." "What kind of place was Enrico's?" "It was a restaurant in Florence where we ate the delicious steak by the river."
    – Stuart F
    Oct 6, 2022 at 13:04
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    Exercises in textbooks that assume one sentence is wrong and the other right without context are useless. They teach rules that don't work. But people believe them anyway, and complain when others use a different rule. Both of these sentences are grammatical in different contexts, but only one describes the context that the author had in mind. That's not very helpful for learning, is it?
    – John Lawler
    Oct 6, 2022 at 14:37

2 Answers 2

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Both sentences are grammatically correct and are perfectly sensible and idiomatic in the right context. Neither sentence can stand on its own: in both cases, “it” needs an antecedent that must come from the context. There is no particular difference with respect to emphasis. Any statement that one of these two sentences is unambiguously more correct or more idiomatic than the other is just wrong.

Here are some plausible contexts:

— Where did you two have your first date?
— It was at a restaurant in Florence where we ate the delicious steak by the river.

This sentence is an answer to a “where” question. Where did [something] happen? At the restaurant described in the answer.

— What was your favourite place to eat in Italy?
— It was a restaurant in Florence where we ate the delicious steak by the river.

This sentence is an answer to a “what” question. What kind of place is [something]? The restaurant described in the answer.

the chapter starts off with using 'what' clauses to add emphasis.

If the topic was emphasis, it's possible that one of the intended choices was this sentence, with a different construction (but even so, the existence of this sentence wouldn't have made the others wrong):

— It was at a restaurant in Florence that we ate a delicious steak by the river.

This sentence is more standalone than the two choices given in the question, because here “it” does not have an antecedent that comes from the context. The antecedent of “it” is the second part of the sentence: “we ate a delicious steak by the river”. This sentence has the same meaning as the simpler sentence

We ate a delicious steak at a restaurant in Florence by the river.

Starting with “it was” puts some emphasis on the restaurant.

I changed “by the river” to be attached to “a restaurant in Florence” rather than “ate a delicious steak”. This isn't absolutely necessary, and a lot of variations are possible in the order of complements. There is a slight difference in meaning. With “by the river” attached to eating, the statement refers not only to the food but also to the ambiance in which the food was eaten. With “by the river” attached to the restaurant, it's an objective detail about the location of the restaurant. I find the straightforward sentence a bit underwhelming if it's describing an ambiance, but it wouldn't be wrong.

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  • "It" doesn't need an antecedent in these sentences. It's like the experiential "it" in "it was raining when we met yesterday".
    – Barmar
    Oct 6, 2022 at 22:03
  • Never mind, I see you eventually described that case near the end of the answer.
    – Barmar
    Oct 6, 2022 at 22:06
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I think the guide says that the second sentence is correct because "it" is a pronoun, and the antecedent of a pronoun has to be a noun.

In the second sentence, the antecedent is being defined as "a restaurant".

So their problem with the first sentence is that "at a restaurant" is a prepositional phrase, and you can't make that the antecedent of "it" because it's not a noun phrase.

The reason this question is problematic is that "it" is used in many different ways. A very common sense is to refer to statements about time, as in "it is 5 o'clock". When you combine this with a common tendency to omit extraneous words, "it was at the restaurant" actually means

It was [when we were] at the restaurant that...

The second sentence would generally be considered acceptable idiomatic English, unless the context required us to be referring to the place rather than the experience.

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