Fiona MacLeod on Where to Find Excellent Cheap Lunches, Which Neighbourhoods Have the Best Street Food, and Why the Supermarket Meal Deal Is a Legitimate Option
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Fiona MacLeod | UK London Info
London is an expensive city in which to eat, and the visitor who budgets based on prices in most European capital cities will find themselves recalculating by day two. A sit-down lunch at a mid-range restaurant in central London will cost £20-30 per person without drinks. A dinner at a restaurant you would consider worth photographing will cost £40-60. These prices are real. The good news is that London also has extraordinary food at every price point, including price points that are very affordable, and that knowing where to look produces access to some of the best food in the world for amounts that will surprise visitors who have been warned primarily about London’s expensive restaurants.
The Supermarket Meal Deal: Underrated
The British supermarket meal deal — available at Pret a Manger, Boots, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and most other chain food retailers — provides a sandwich, a snack, and a drink for approximately £3.50-5.00, representing the most calorie-efficient and budget-friendly lunch option available in central London. This is not a suggestion to eat every meal from a supermarket, but it is a sincere recommendation for at least some lunches on a budget-conscious trip, because the British sandwich is, at its best (M&S Food in particular, Pret at the premium end), genuinely good, and the price represents a significant saving relative to an equivalent lunch in any sit-down restaurant. The money saved funds the good dinner. This is travel arithmetic.
Where to Find Good Cheap Food
Chinatown in Soho (Gerrard Street and the surrounding streets) offers some of the best value Chinese food in London, with dim sum available at lunchtime at prices significantly below equivalent quality elsewhere in the city. The restaurants are busy, the service is fast, and the food — particularly the BBQ meats and the steamed dim sum — is excellent. Brick Lane in Shoreditch is home to the most concentrated Bengali restaurant district in Britain, where the competition between restaurants is fierce and the prices are well below the London average for the quality available. Peckham in south-east London has developed a remarkable food scene over the past decade, with a market and restaurant ecosystem centred on Rye Lane and Copeland Park that offers some of the most diverse and affordable food in the city — West African, Jamaican, Vietnamese, and multiple categories of fusion prepared by people who have spent their lives cooking these traditions rather than restaurants that have adopted them as a concept.
Borough Market (see the separate market guide) is excellent for a standing lunch from its ready-to-eat vendors, at a price that is slightly higher than the supermarket meal deal but significantly lower than a sit-down restaurant and at a quality that frequently exceeds both. The Kappacasein toasted cheese sandwich, if it is available, is one of the best things available for lunch in London. It costs approximately £8. It is worth £8.
The Neighbourhood Principle
The fundamental principle of eating well in London without spending a lot is the neighbourhood principle: eat where the local community eats rather than where the tourist infrastructure has concentrated restaurants whose pricing reflects footfall from visitors rather than local competition. Restaurants on Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly, and the immediate vicinity of major tourist attractions charge a premium for their location that the food does not necessarily justify. Restaurants two streets away from those attractions, serving the local community, charge market rates for food of comparable or better quality. The geography of London food pricing is straightforwardly about foot traffic: the more tourists per square metre, the higher the prices. Moving away from the tourist concentration by even five minutes’ walk produces significantly better value.
According to Time Out London’s restaurant guide, the city’s best-value restaurants are concentrated in areas including Brixton, Peckham, Dalston, Tooting, and Whitechapel — areas that are fully accessible by tube or bus and that offer food scenes representing some of the most interesting immigrant cuisines available in any European city. The food in these areas is not a budget alternative to the real London food experience. It is the real London food experience, eaten by Londoners who live in and near these communities. The visitor who makes the effort to reach them gets a genuinely better meal for genuinely less money and a genuinely more authentic engagement with what London actually is when it is not performing itself for tourists. This is the best reason to move off the tourist trail. The food is better. The prices are lower. The city reveals something real.
Fiona MacLeod writes London food and travel guides. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more London food and travel tips, visit NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
One more piece of food advice that visitor guides rarely include but that Londoners rely on: the “lunch special” culture that many London restaurants operate, offering a set lunch menu at significantly reduced prices compared to their dinner menu. Restaurants that are genuinely excellent at dinner — places that would cost £50-70 per person in the evening — frequently offer two or three courses at lunch for £20-25, which represents access to serious cooking at a price that is affordable for most visitors. The Michelin-starred restaurants of Mayfair and the City have always done this. Many of the neighbourhood restaurants that have developed genuine culinary reputations in areas like Clerkenwell, Bermondsey, and Hackney have adopted the same model. The practical approach: identify a restaurant that you would like to eat at but whose dinner prices exceed your budget, check whether they offer a set lunch, and book the lunch. You get the same kitchen, the same ingredients, the same cooking, at a different price point. According to Time Out London, the set lunch at many of London’s best restaurants represents the best value eating in the city for visitors who plan ahead. This is true. Plan ahead. Book the lunch. Eat well. Walk back through the city with the specific satisfaction of having found the good version of something at the right price, which is one of the genuine pleasures of being in a city that rewards the visitor who pays attention.
