Fiona MacLeod on how to eat well in London without spending a fortune or eating badly for the sake of it
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Fiona MacLeod | The London Prat
London’s food scene has, over the past twenty years, undergone a transformation so thorough that the city which was once a reliable source of jokes about bad food has become one of the world’s great eating cities, with a range and quality of restaurants that reflects the cultural diversity of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan populations and that competes seriously with Paris, New York, Tokyo, and the other cities that have traditionally defined what it means to eat well in a great city. This is genuinely true. It is also true that eating badly in London is easy to do, and that the tourist areas of central London contain restaurants of variable quality at prices that do not reflect the variability. Knowing how to navigate this is the difference between a good trip and a great one.
The single most useful piece of advice I can give for eating well in London is to follow the density of the food, not the density of the tourist activity. The best food in London is almost never in the places where the most tourists are. Covent Garden has some excellent restaurants and many expensive average ones. Borough Market, a ten-minute walk south across the river, has extraordinary food at accessible prices. Leicester Square is primarily a cinema district. Chinatown, ten minutes from Leicester Square, has excellent Chinese, Malaysian, and broader Asian food at prices that are significantly lower than the surrounding area.
The Categories That Reliably Deliver
For genuinely excellent food at prices that are not London’s highest, the following categories consistently deliver: London’s Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants, particularly outside Zone 1 in areas like Tooting, Wembley, and Whitechapel; the Turkish and Kurdish restaurants along Green Lanes in North London; the Vietnamese restaurants in Shoreditch and Hackney; the West African restaurants in Peckham and Brixton; and the Japanese restaurants that have proliferated throughout Zone 1-2 and that, particularly at lunch, offer extraordinary value. These are not the restaurants that appear in Michelin guides — though some have — but they represent the food that Londoners actually eat when they are eating well, which is the reliable indicator of where to go.
For the special occasion meal, London’s restaurant scene at the upper end is genuinely world-class and the price, while significant, is often comparable to equivalent quality elsewhere. Book ahead. Always book ahead. Visit London has restaurant recommendations that have improved in their diversity in recent years. The London Prat covers London food with the honest enthusiasm of people who eat here regularly. Eat well. The food deserves it. London has earned the compliment.
London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.
The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.
Why This Matters for London
London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.
This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.
The city continues past any single entry. So does the writing. So, presumably, does London itself, which has outlasted every prediction about its decline and every proclamation about its reinvention with the serene indifference of a place that knows it will still be here next week.
More London: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
