99 Places To Eat Lunch In Central London (That Aren’t Pret)

Part 2: Farringdon, Bloomsbury, Holborn, Clerkenwell, Covent Garden. Another Vittles lunch guide (and map). Words by Jonathan Nunn and others.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s newsletter is a new 99 Guide, which covers London’s central neighbourhoods of Farringdon, Clerkenwell, Holborn, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, the Strand and Fleet Street.

To view the whole guide and map, you can subscribe to Vittles below for £7 a month or £59 for the year, which gives you full access to the back catalogue of features, essays, restaurant guides, recipes, and reviews.

Last year, we updated our bumper guide of 99 Places To Eat Lunch Near Oxford Circus That Aren’t Pret, which has often been described by our readers as the single most useful guide we’ve ever done. The goal was not to produce a destination guide, but rather an everyday guide for weekday lunches at places where you might be able to use the 30, 45, maybe 60 (if you’re lucky) minutes allotted to you to carve out some kind of small pleasure from the working day. These restaurants and cafés serve meals where efficiency and value are the highest virtues – things which Pret excels at – but are also places where you can take a pleasant lunch break and actually enjoy some hot food.

That first guide was for the West End because it was the place I knew best and I could draw on my own experience of working in the area for a decade. However, this second guide, to what estate agents call ‘London’s Midtown’, and which comprises Farringdon, Clerkenwell, Holborn, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, the Strand and Fleet Street, plus the southern end of King’s Cross, has taken us longer. While the West End is a neighbourhood of leisure, these are neighbourhoods of institutions: UCL, King’s College, SOAS, the Inns of Court, the British Library. As such, there are an overwhelming number of restaurants and cafés that focus on lunch, serving the nearby working populations. It’s taken a year of eating and research, along with the help of many contributors, but I think this is our best guide yet: it contains recommendations for the new Chinatown of Bloomsbury, sandwich shops and wrap stands, the city’s most interesting street food market, tons of falafel, excellent Vietnamese and Korean takeaways, and many many more.

We have also updated our West End guide, which you can find here. There is a brand new map — if you have the old map saved to your phone it’s now out of date and you can download the new one below.

We will publish the third central London guide, to the City, Barbican and Finsbury, Shoreditch and Spitalfields, later this year. Until then: eat slowly, take an extra ten minutes of lunch break and always, always take a shit on company time.

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All entries by Jonathan Nunn unless otherwise stated.

Contributors:

BB – Barclay Bram, SW – Sean Wyer, YS – Yanyu Sun, EP-H – Ellen Peirson-Hagger, JB – Jonathan Beckman, CW – Charlie Wright, KLW – Kylie Lysette Warner, GH – Grace Hall, ST – Sandrine Tiller, JW – Janis Wong, LS – Luca Spiller, JA – Joyce Arnold, MA – Maurice Abboudi, MA-C - Montague Ashley-Craig, TO – Toyo Odetunde, GK – Geraldine Krall, HP – Hoagy Pollen, GC – Gavin Cleaver, CJ – Cristina Jerney, LC – Lucy Carter, CM – Caroline Marques, SQ – Siqi Chong, NC – Naseer Chia, SS – Sejal Sukhadwala, SB – Saira Banu, VC – Vitória Croda, KP – Kelly Pochyba, EF – Ed Fenwick, RA – Riana Austin, LT - Liz Tray, IR - Isaac Rangaswami, NB - Nick Bramham.

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Holborn, Chancery Lane and Fleet Street

One of many half chickens on rice at one of central London’s many Lebanese Grills

Lebanese Grill Express
The uniform at Lebanese Grill – the most famous restaurant on road, if that road is Leather Lane – is blacked-out shoes, black tracksuit and black balaclava, although they’ll let you order a fantastic half chicken, chips and spicy rice if you’re off-theme. There is no relation to the Elephant and Castle takeaway of the same name, apart from having the same menu. 84 Leather Lane, EC1N 7TT

Leather Lane Market
If I wrote out everything you could get at Leather Lane Market there would be an extra 30 entries, so it’s worth a guide in itself, but I will say this: no other market in the city gives as much insight into the eating habits of Londoners than this one. Grilled chicken, wraps, katsu, grilled chicken wraps, katsu grilled chicken, grilled chicken katsu wraps and much more. Gebeta, one of the few good central Ethiopian restaurants, also runs a stall there. Leather Lane, EC1N 7TJ

The Tempeh Man at Leather Lane Market
Tempeh can be tricky to get right when cooking at home, but William Mitchell, the titular tempeh man, has spent years honing his craft to offer two perfected dishes: the tomatoey cumin version and the creamier, coconutty lode. Whichever you pick, this stall will convince even the most tempeh-sceptical of the joy of soy. Two carb-y sides are on offer (rice or a flatbread) and the portions are generous, coming in at just £7.50 a box. The stall is only there on a Tuesday and has a consistent yet fast-moving queue, making it perfect for a first-day-in-the-office treat. As Mitchell told me as he handed over my giant box of rice and stew: ‘This will do you good.’ LC Leather Lane, EC1N 7TR

The coffee shops of Leather Lane
It’s not exactly lunch, but Leather Lane is blessed with three of the most interesting coffee shops in London. Prufrock Coffee, one of the originators of the London coffee scene, is now a brunch spot that still has excellent coffee, while Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood’s Colonna and Smalls has opened at the top end, a second branch of his Bath original. Most intriguingly, the Chinese-owned Comp Coffee has recently opened, and its list of special drinks – ristretto with freeze distilled milk, fermented pineapple syrup cold brew – are every bit as good and silly as a Los Angeles coffee shop.

Mugen
I went to Mugen for the first time last year for research during my review of Hase-Ya, as it was one of the few other restaurants in the city serving matsumae sushi, with its lightly cured mackerel and a thin layer of kelp. The matsumae here is as good as Hase-Ya’s, and if you come with someone, it makes an ideal dish to share with a couple of teishoku sets. 9-15 Leather Lane, EC1N 7ST

Kin
Kin ticks all the boxes of a fusion restaurant: variety of options, aesthetically pleasing dishes, nicely designed interiors and overall good quality meals. It also works for more formal occasions, such as lunch with your manager. LS 88 Leather Lane, EC1N 7TT

Assenheims
We don’t talk enough about how weird Assenheims is: a pan-Latin American chain with a German name whose branches mainly congregate around the City. The order here is chicken – cooked on the grill until the skin is snappable, with rice and green sauce. It’s Lebanese Grill, but for people who know about high-yield bonds. 4 Holborn, EC1N 2LL

Dilieto
Not to be mistaken for the similarly named Di Lieto café in Oval, you will see the line for Dilieto’s stretching down Fleet Street before you see the shopfront. It’s essentially the type of Italian-ish sandwich shop that you get across Mayfair and the City, but done better. I am a creature of habit and usually just get a number one melt. Half a sandwich is actually enough for one person. 175 Fleet St, EC4A 2EA

7 Floor
A brilliant assam laksa specialist in Holborn Food Hub. The prawn mee, the hor fun and particularly the sweet chee cheong fun are crowd-pleasers (and honestly, I prefer them), but the assam laksa is dark and dank, ‘pekat’ (thick) as Malaysians like to say, and more stew than soup. I wish it did curry mee on weekdays, but it’s a weekend-only special. 78 Southampton Row, WC1B 4AR

Dapur
A nasi campur specialist and arguably the best Malaysian restaurant in London. I love the lesser-seen dishes from Johor, like the pinkish ayam ros Johor, or its steamed tofu dipped in egg, then deep-fried and stirred into sambal. The unsung heroes of the menu are the vegetables, like stir-fried green beans that still retain a snap, or squash cooked down in coconut milk until it is almost baby food. Get here early, as the best dishes sell out. 13 Lamb’s Conduit Passage, WC1R 4RH

Pho S82
Most Vietnamese restaurants around central, understandably, specialise in bánh mì and easily takeawayable meats and rice. Pho S82, tucked around the back of Holborn station, is one of the few that really specialises in pho. The first time I went there, it served me the best beef pho I’ve had in London outside of Hoxton, Surrey Quays or Deptford (the slow-cooked beef pho is also great). 10 Little Turnstile, WC1V 7DX

After the paywall: 80+ more recommendations for lunches in Clerkenwell, Farringdon, Bloomsbury, Holborn, Covent Garden and The Strand.