99 Places To Eat Lunch In Central London (That Aren’t Pret)
Part 3: The City, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch, Spitalfields and Aldgate. Another Vittles lunch guide (and map). Words by Shekha Vyas, Jonathan Nunn and others.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants.
In case you missed it, on Wednesday we announced our first ever guidebook, Ice Cream City, Ruby Tandoh’s love letter to London’s ice cream culture. You can preorder a copy here – we’ve sold half the print run already, so don’t dawdle!
Today’s newsletter heads east with our third central London lunch guide, which covers the City of London, Liverpool Street, Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Shoreditch, Aldgate and bits of Whitechapel. As with our Oxford Circus and Farringdon 99s, this information is not intended as a destination dining guide. A lunch, for many people, is about speed, survival and the small wins you can achieve in the hour (or, more likely, the half hour) you have to turn a sad desk meal into something more fulfilling. For this guide, we needed someone who knows the area with an intimacy you can only gain from working there, so we’re delighted to hand you over to Shekha Vyas.
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, recipes, reviews and restaurant guides — including our other two guides to lunch in central London (links below).
99 Places To Eat Lunch In Central London (That Aren’t Pret). Part 3.
I’ve spent the better part of two decades eating around this area, through studying, various jobs and the general chaos of trying to exist in London. Even so, putting this guide together has taken months of revisiting and re-evaluating from the contributors, accounting for consistency over time as well as the constant churn of closures and new openings. What remains is a set of personal favourites that have held up, and that each of us has found ourselves returning to, often without much thought. After a while, you don’t just find a decent lunch, you find your lunch – the place that seems to understand exactly what you need at 1.17 pm on a Tuesday.
What follows is a highly subjective map of those places. Expect some of the best noodles, sandwiches and pizza in the capital, alongside Georgian khachapuri, Bengali curries and Japanese lunch sets. A decent lunch is easy enough to find. Your lunch is harder. Hopefully, this helps. SV
Contributors:
SV – Shekha Vyas, JN – Jonathan Nunn, GCl – Gavin Cleaver, GC – Guan Chua, AC – Adam Coghlan, AH – Angela Hui, EZ – Elaine Zhao, MA – MiMi Aye, MA-C – Montague Ashley-Craig, JH – Joel Hart, RA – Riana Austin, BB – Barclay Bram, TMS – Tomé Morrissy-Swan.
St Paul’s and Bank
Porterford Butchers
A superb view of St. Paul’s will keep you occupied in the winding queue for this butcher’s shop’s lunchtime baguette queue, which showcases a frankly incredible amount of meat, often literally shovelled from the oven into the display cases. The pepper steak is the prime mover, but everything here is a) good and b) will require a post-lunch lie-down. GCl 72 Watling St, EC4M 9EB
Deli Box
Still open, in defiance of One New Change and the chains all around it, and still bashing out the cheapest katsu curry in central. Is it life-changing? No. Is it good for £6.50? Absolutely. And charming to boot. GCl 126 Cheapside, EC2V 6BT
Urban Food Court
Appalling name for what is actually a restaurant, albeit one that would have been difficult to name anyway, given its apparent goal of incorporating every cuisine on earth. While this lunch might give you the option of ordering spaghetti, dim sum and a burger at the same time, you should skip all that and just get the pad kra pao. GCl 28 Watling St, EC4M 9BR
Rustichino
Woefully overlooked by local lunch-eaters, I’ve been getting lunch at this Italian café for almost a decade, and it absolutely slaps. People might be put off by the very loud Phil Collins tunes blaring out of the stereo, but that’s just on so it’s less obvious that all the staff are constantly shouting at each other. The salt beef is great, but you can barely go wrong with any filling here. GCl Foster Lane, EC2V 6HH
Rosslyn Coffee
I was quite indifferent to coffee until Rosslyn opened outside my work. Now, probably the main reason I go into the office is to get a flat white from the London Wall outpost. On a sunny day, as a treat, you can get an affogato from a couple of its outlets, and the ice cream is treated exactly like the coffee – with the extreme seriousness it deserves. Superb. GCl 118 London Wall, EC2Y 5JA
Koya City
The Bloomberg Arcade location of Koya channels the quiet, intimate feel of Shuko Oda and John Devitt’s original Soho site. Udon and dashi are made fresh in-house every day, and the menu lets you customise your noodles and broth temperature, depending on mood and weather. The plain kake udon is one of the best-value lunches in the area at £5.40 for a half bowl, though I have a soft spot for the buta kasu-miso, where thin, creamy slices of pork sit in a deeply umami broth sharpened with fermented miso lees. SV 10-12 Bloomberg Arcade, EC4N 8AR
Traditional Pure
A very chaotic spot by Mansion House tube, Traditional Pure is staffed by one man with a huge salad bar and a lot of stickers, and one woman who is seemingly tasked with doing every single bit of cooking and assembly as the orders fly in around her. The genre-defying menu veers from jerk chicken to a doner kebab, but the Persian kofte with mint and yoghurt is a real winner. The queue can really build up, so it’s best to go early. GCl 51 Queen Victoria St, EC4N 4SG
Stem & Stem
More of a business lunch spot, this will especially work if your lunch guest really likes flowers, as the restaurant is inexplicably also a florist. Nevertheless, the food, entirely UK sourced and cooked by the well-travelled Ed Boarland, is really quite excellent, and for now, while the place is relatively new, you can regularly get a table at lunch. GCl 12 Bow Lane, EC4M 9AL
Assenheims
Lebanese Grill, but for people who know about high-yield bonds. JN 25 Wormwood St, EC2M 1RP, 55 Ludgate Hill, EC4M 7JW, 63 Queen Victoria St, EC4N 4UA
Sweetings
The City is a place for lunch restaurants, and Sweetings is the queen of them (and doesn’t even bother opening for dinner). There’s floppy, buttered brown bread as standard, which I usually augment with an order of fried whitebait, then a piece of grilled white fish if I’m feeling light, or a bubbling fish pie with steamed greens if I want something heavier. The best thing on the menu is a truly outstanding steamed syrup sponge pudding with the tang of suet, which you can order with a trio of cream, custard and ice cream if you ask nicely. JN 39 Queen Victoria St, EC4N 4SF
Barbican and Old Street
Whitecross Street Market
Actual chaos in the shape of the busiest lunch food market you’ve ever seen, as every office worker within a mile descends onto the small street outside a Waitrose. Based around the back of the Barbican, there are some very decent options here for lunch, but I’m a particular fan of Bibento (Korean/Japanese) and Karuna (Indian). GCl Whitecross St, EC1Y 8JL
Bap Foods
This Korean spot with a tiny menu will sell you a good-to-great bibimibap and some decent KFC for a reasonable price. If you don’t get the fried egg and homemade kimchi on top of your meal, you have entirely lost your way. GCl 52 Old St, EC1V 9AJ
Jiak
This ruthlessly efficient hole-in-the-wall Malaysian spot, positioned tactically close to the Barbican, does four things: a laksa, a rendang, a Hainanese chicken and usually something else vegan, which I’ve never ordered. Because of scarcity alone, I usually get the Hainanese chicken and scarf it out on a table or eat it in the covered area outside the Waitrose. A lifesaver if you’re nearby. JN 2c Whitecross St, EC1Y 8NX
Fish Central
A rare chippy that functions both as a neighbourhood spot that you would go to every week if you lived nearby, and a destination. Owned by Cypriot George Hussein, the fish and chips here is the highest expression of the London style, with blond chips and excellent fish. Eating in can be huge fun, but one of London’s great pleasures is to take the package outside, unwrap it like a Christmas present and eat the steaming chips while standing (or sitting) on the concrete. JN 149-155 Central St, EC1V 8AP
Dodam Korea
After experiencing the heat of the sauna at Ironmonger Row Baths nearby, I tend to keep it light with barley tea and either seaweed and oat porridge or its £10 lunch special of marinated tofu, black rice and banchan (side dishes) at Dodam Korea. In the evenings, it’s fun to go as a group and put the menu to work: vegetarian-adapted hotpot with tteokbokki, ramyeon, boiled egg, dumplings and gimmari, ugeoji-tang (hangover soup) of beef and preserved cabbage or four different versions of volcano fried rice. RA 131-133 Central St, EC1V 8AP
Devi Dhaba
This Rajasthani cafe used to be opposite Fish Central near the Barbican but moved to Old Street a few years ago, where it serves the type of ‘rice and three’ – rice plus three curries of your choice – that you often get in Manchester. The curries here are excellent, although I usually always try to get the lamb meatballs; one, because no one else does them and two, because I have never knowingly turned down a meatball. JN 39 Scrutton St, EC2A 4HU
Kennedy’s Barbican
A reliable chippy in the Square Mile to scratch that fish and chips itch. The cod and haddock are both decent – the batter is light and crunchy, the fresh fish still moist and flaky from a precise fry. Terrific tartare sauce, too. The lunchtime deal on fish and chips provides added incentive. GC 169 Whitecross St, EC1Y 8JT
Monohon Ramen
Thankfully, London lost its appetite for ramen restaurants – and the associated nerdery that comes with them – some time ago, but Monohon is one of the few that I still rate. The shouyu tonkotsu has the umami espresso intensity you want from tonkotsu, but none of the sickening feeling that you can sometimes get from ingesting a bowl of liquid fat. JN 102 Old St, EC1V 9AY
Banh Mi and Son
Banh Mi and Son’s owner Thomas Han, who takes his van to the market on Clifton Street during the week, previously worked as a chef for Alexis Gauthier in Soho and clearly knows about flavour and texture. Bánh mì here comes with pork striploin (two steaks, the portions are generous), heavily marinated in lemongrass with a healthy spread of duck pâté, or Chinese barbecue pork ribeye well scented by five-spice. All come with sriracha, pickled cucumber, carrot and coriander. ‘Salt, sugar, fat and gluten all included,” announces Han’s van. His jokes are killer, his bánh mi are even better. TMS
61 Clifton St, EC2A 2EA
Shoreditch and Liverpool Street
Dumbo
This Paris import arrived with a bucketload of hype, which at this point: shrug emoji. Now I know folks too embedded in the burger discourse who complain about the quality of the meat and/or the composition of the veg patty, but truth be told, this is just simple, lowest common-denominator new-wave fast food. They are good smashburgers that are faithful, both structurally and texturally, to their much more evil antecedents. AC 119 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 7DG
Leila’s Shop
I genuinely loved eating here when Alex Jackson was cooking, and although he’s left for The Garden Café, Leila’s is still very clearly putting out the food that it wants to cook, aided by excellent produce from the shop next door. The desserts and bakes by Stroma Sinclair are some of the best in the city. JN 15-17 Calvert Avenue, E2 7JP
Vincenzo’s
The hyperregionalisation of pizza in London has been a feature of the city’s dining scene in the post-Neapolitan era. We’ve had Crisp, All Kaps, New Haven apizza (from a guy whose talent for cooking pizza was matched only by his ability to snide every other pizzaiolo in London), Chicago tavern, Long Island grandma pies and more. Within this same timeframe, Tom Vincent of Vincenzo’s has been perfecting his interpretation of the New York slice at his spot in Bushey. Late last year, Vincent landed in Shoreditch, and for me he serves the best slices in the city. AC 122 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 6DG
Below the paywall: Lots more in Shoreditch and Liverpool Street, as well Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Aldgate, Tower Hill, Whitechapel and the full map.