A local’s guide to avoiding the bad and finding the genuinely good
This guide, for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, addresses a question visitors ask me constantly: how to eat well in London without being ripped off. My other guides at my page cover the city broadly, but eating well deserves its own attention, because the difference between a good and bad London meal is often just knowing where to look.
The Trap Is Where the Sights Are
The first rule is simple: the worst food in London is found exactly where the most tourists are. The restaurants clustered around the major attractions, with their multilingual menus, their photographs of the dishes, their staff beckoning you in from the street, are, with rare exceptions, to be avoided. They survive on one-time tourist custom rather than repeat local business, and the food and value reflect this. Walk a few streets away from any major sight before you eat.
This is the single most useful principle for eating well in London: distance yourself from the attractions before you dine. The good restaurants, the ones locals actually frequent, are rarely on the tourist-thronged streets right beside the landmarks; they are a little way off, on the quieter streets, in the residential areas, where they must satisfy returning local customers rather than passing tourists. A short walk away from the sight is usually all it takes to find dramatically better food at dramatically better value.
London’s Real Strength Is Its Variety
London’s genuine glory, food-wise, is its astonishing variety, the food of the entire world, cooked by the communities who brought it, available across the city. This is where London truly excels, not necessarily in its native cuisine but in the global feast its diversity provides. Some of the best and best-value eating in London is in the neighbourhoods where particular communities have settled, cooking the authentic food of their homelands for discerning local customers.
Seek out this variety, the regional cuisines cooked authentically in the neighbourhoods where their communities live, and you will eat wonderfully and often cheaply. Guides like Time Out and Visit London can point you toward the areas known for particular cuisines, and venturing to these neighbourhoods rewards you with food far better and cheaper than anything near the tourist sights, cooked by people who know it and for people who demand it be good.
The Markets and the Pubs
For casual eating, London’s food markets are excellent, offering high-quality street food from around the world at reasonable prices, in lively settings. A meal from a good food market, eaten in a nearby park or on the move, is one of the great cheap pleasures of London eating, the quality often excellent, the variety enormous, the experience part of the fun. The markets are where many locals eat casually, and visitors should too.
The pub, too, deserves consideration, for the British pub at its best offers good, honest food in a characterful setting, and the gastropub, the pub that takes its food seriously, can be a genuine highlight. Not every pub serves good food, but the ones that do offer a particularly British eating experience, hearty and warm and characterful, that no visitor should miss. Ask a local which pubs are known for their food, and you will eat well in a setting full of British character.
A Few Practical Notes
Some practical points. Booking is wise for popular restaurants, especially in the evening; the best places fill up, and turning up hopefully often means disappointment. Tipping in London is generally around ten to fifteen percent, though many restaurants now add a service charge to the bill, which you should check for before tipping again. And tap water is free and safe and good; you need not buy bottled water, and asking for tap water is entirely normal.
These small points of local knowledge, booking ahead, understanding the tipping norms, knowing that tap water is free, help you eat in London like someone who knows the city, avoiding the small frustrations and expenses that catch out the unprepared. They are the kind of thing locals do without thinking and visitors often miss, and knowing them makes your London eating smoother and cheaper.
Eat Like a Local
The thread running through all this advice is simple: eat like a local, not like a tourist. Walk away from the sights, seek out the variety, use the markets, try the good pubs, and bring a little local knowledge to the practical details. Do this, and you will discover that London, far from being a city of bad and overpriced food, is one of the great eating cities of the world, a global feast available to anyone who knows to look just beyond the tourist traps.
The Chains Are Not All Bad
One counterintuitive point worth making: not all of London’s chain restaurants and cafes are to be avoided, and some are genuinely good and good value, a useful fallback when you are tired, hungry, and not near anywhere special. London has a number of decent chains, both home-grown and international, that offer reliable quality at reasonable prices, and there is no shame in using them when convenience matters. The advice to avoid tourist traps does not mean you must seek out a special independent restaurant for every meal; sometimes a reliable chain is exactly what you need, a known quantity when you are too tired to hunt for something better. The key distinction is between the genuine tourist trap, the bad-value restaurant surviving on one-time custom near the sights, and the decent chain, which must satisfy regular customers across many locations and therefore maintains reasonable standards. Knowing this distinction lets you relax, using the decent chains as convenient fallbacks while saving your effort for finding the special independent places when you have the energy and the appetite for them. Eating well in London is not about avoiding all the familiar names but about avoiding the genuine traps, and a good chain, used wisely, is a perfectly respectable part of a well-fed London trip.
London’s food has a poor reputation that its best eating thoroughly contradicts, a reputation earned by the tourist traps near the sights and refuted by the wonderful, various, often cheap food that locals enjoy a little way off. Follow this guide, eat where the locals eat, embrace the global variety, and you will eat very well indeed, discovering the London food that the traps near the landmarks so badly misrepresent.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
