How do Asian restaurants manage to escape the Equal Opportunities Act?

Every time I go into an Asian restaurant, I've noticed that all of it's workers are of Asian decent. I was wondering how they manage to get away with this because I was always under the impression that it was illegal to employ somebody on the grounds of race (unless it's in acting or something).

That's funny, because everytime i walk into pubs, cafes and fish/chips bars i always see white British people working. Can you explain that to me? Cheers!

Yes it is an assumption, but I wouldn't call it 'shameless'.
I go to many Asian restaurants and most of the one's I have been to ONLY have Asian staff members.
I am of Asian decent myself and I know for a fact that if I were to apply to a Filipino restaurant in my area I would get the job on the basis of my cultural heritage and ethnicity.

My original question was about what loopholes these restaurants could have used in order to employ staff of a particular race.

People have explained to you why it is that asian restaurants have largely asian staff (because of hiring relatives, the people who apply and cooking skills and food knowledge)- and people have given examples of being hired at asian restaurants when not asian- yet you just dismiss all that and say 'well I bet they discriminate anyway'. Do you not see how that's quite obtuse, when there are so many other explainations?

Hard to find Westerners that can speak any sort of Chinese and cook Chinese food.

I knew about the exception for "ethnic" restaurants. But I wonder if you could apply the same reasoning to not hire non-whites. Say I opened a medieval themed restaurant that had waiters dressed in period costume. Would I be allowed to refuse to hire non-whites? After all, I doubt there were many non-whites in medieval England, so it wouldn't really be very authentic to have a black waiter.

When i go to an Authentic restaurant i expect it to be Authentic not riddled with different races.

Every time I go into an Asian restaurant, I've noticed that all of it's workers are of Asian decent. I was wondering how they manage to get away with this because I was always under the impression that it was illegal to employ somebody on the grounds of race (unless it's in acting or something).

I am completely aware of what you just said, in fact I did go on to mention on the first page that I now had the answer to my question; I wanted to know what the specific loopholes in the human rights were and somebody kindly answered that for me.
I am also aware of non-Asians working in Asian restaurants, but that wasn't what I was asking about!

Oh, and I can assure you that not once did I say 'well I bet they discriminate anyway'. I wasn't inferring in any way that I felt it was discriminative for certain restaurants to only recruit people from their own race, I was only curious to how they managed to get away with what they were doing! If anything, I have absolutely no objection to non-Asians working in, say, a Chinese restaurant, I believe that cultures should mix and not to isolate themselves from other cultures!

I can't understand why people on this thread are accusing me of things I certainly am not, my question was clearly one out of curiosity not to cause a stir with the viciously politically correct.

How many indians do you see serving at the chippy then..or the pub?

Every time I go into an Asian restaurant, I've noticed that all of it's workers are of Asian decent. I was wondering how they manage to get away with this because I was always under the impression that it was illegal to employ somebody on the grounds of race (unless it's in acting or something).