How to find collocates…
You can use www.sketchengine.co.uk to find collocates in the British National Corpus. You will need to register for a trial account. Click where it says: “Register for a 30-day free trial account here”. You will receive an email with the details of your free account. Log in and click on “British National Corpus” from the table. This will take you to a search page. CLick on “word sketch”, it’s the 4th link on the top menu. Write your words in the field “Lemma”, select the right part of speech (noun, verb, etc. - restaurant = noun) and then click on show word sketch, the gray button at the bottom. If you want to know which adjectives collocate with restaurant, for instance, the table you must look at is the “a_modifier” table.
You can use the web and www.webcorp.org.uk. Go to the “advanced search options”. Input your word, eg. restaurant and wait. It takes some time. If you want to make sure the results are taken from British websites, go where it says “Site Domain” and in the space below put the extension of the domain of British websites, .co.uk You can check Canadian websites putting .ca, Australian websites with .au etc Then click on “submit”. It will take a while. When you have your result click on “sort - left” and you will have your list of collocates.
Have fun!