99 Places To Eat Lunch Near Oxford Circus That Aren't Pret
99 Places To Eat Lunch Near Oxford Circus That Aren't Pret
The Rosetta Stone of lunch. Words by Jonathan Nunn and others.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s newsletter is a new and updated version of our guide to central London lunch options, which will be the first in a series of three. We are currently commissioning the next 99 Guide, which covers Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, Clerkenwell, Farringdon and Aldwych. If you would like to contribute to this, please email us at vittlesrestaurants@gmail.com
To read the entirety of today’s newsletter, please subscribe below. There is a full Google map of all entries at the end.
99 Places To Eat Lunch Near Oxford Circus That Aren't Pret
There are lunches you wait for, the ones you’re willing to debase yourself for by standing in a queue that winds through London Fields like a tapeworm. But that kind of destination dining is not the way most people eat every day. A weekday lunch is usually time-dependent, a way of using the 30, 45, maybe 60 (if you’re lucky) minutes allotted to you by the working day to carve out some kind of small pleasure for yourself, a meal where efficiency and cheapness are the highest virtues. Too often, this type of eating means poor lunches that do little except alleviate hunger. Most often of all, it means Pret.
Pret a Manger does not offer value or quality but it does promise something priceless: ruthless consistency. Most of the time we don’t want to take a risk on a bad meal, so we accept a known one. Pret and its ilk – Itsu (Japanese Pret), Joe and the Juice (Scandi Pret), Leon (Pret for anhedonists) – prey on this well-founded fear, and have become so much a part of the everyday infrastructure of our lives that sometimes we can no longer imagine an alternative. We take sandwiches away and sit at our desks, reducing that half hour of freedom to ten minutes of efficient, prosaic eating. It’s food to fulfil a function, and that function is to make you work more.
Now, I’m not saying you should take long lunch breaks as a matter of praxis, but taking the time to have a pleasant lunch break and actually enjoy your food is a small adjustment to your day that can have an outsized effect on your happiness. During the ten years that I spent working near Oxford Circus, I used my own lunch breaks to do just this, working out the exact radius that would allow me just enough time to walk to and from a restaurant or café, sit down and savour my food, even if on a nearby bench. Still, of those 2,000-3,000 or so lunches, a significant proportion were a waste of my time and money. This is why Vittles, with the help of a small cohort of contributors, has put together a fully tested and newly updated list of 99 restaurants, cafés, coffee shops and takeaways, all within a 15-minute walk or a five-minute tube ride of Oxford Circus, covering Soho, Marylebone, Fitzrovia, Mayfair, Chinatown and St. James. In this area you’ll find 38 (and counting) Prets, but you’ll also find some of the best katsu curries in the city, Sudanese, Egyptian, Palestinian and Lebanese falafel, Uyghur and Uzbek noodles, and three or four of London’s great sandwich shops.
Remember: eat slowly, take an extra ten minutes of lunch break, and always, always take a shit on company time.
All entries by Jonathan Nunn unless otherwise stated.
Contributors
AKK - Adrienne Katz Kennedy
HD - Hannah Donovan
IR - Isaac Rangaswami
JH- Joel Hart
KP - Kelly Pochyba
MA - Montague Ashley-Craig
MB - Maazin Buhari
SW - Sean Wyer
TF - The Fence
Chinatown and Leicester Square
Wong Kei
As food blogger bellaphon once put it, it’s the Mother of last resorts in Chinatown – the service is curt and quick, the food is quick and hot, and the tea is hot and free. I usually order the won ton soup (without noodles, with crispy pork), the stuffed aubergine, green pepper and tofu on rice (above), or any of the pork chop dishes. If I was mayor I would roll Wong Keis out across London like Pret. (For more recommendations use the greatest lunch repository on the internet: the Wong Kei Tumblr). 41-43 Wardour St, W1D 6PX
Old Town 97
This is a better spot at midnight than it is at midday, but still, it’s great for hor fun – beef brisket and seafood with scrambled egg sauce especially. Also, it does excellent off-menu fried rice dishes that are more famous than anything on the menu: LSE (pork chop in scrambled egg sauce) and the ah ming (pork, beans and fried tofu) all with egg-fried rice and a fried egg on top. 19 Wardour St, W1D 6PL
Cafe TPT
The best dai pai dong-style restaurant in London. If I’m in a rush I’ll order the beef flank curry on rice (although you have to fight to get them to do this as a one-plate now). If I have time then the baked pork chop Macau-style is my ultimate comfort dish – rice, pork chop, onions and a sauce mornay, baked until oozing and slightly charred, to which I add loads of the house chilli oil. 21 Wardour St, W1D 6PN
Four Seasons or Gold Mine
Going to either of these is like going to KFC when there’s a Chicken Cottage next to it. If I’m feeling slightly rich and willing to spend £15+ on duck, then I’ll order roast meats, particularly the roast duck and siu yuk on rice. I would like to say I have a definitive favourite, but I ordered both simultaneously recently and the only discernible difference was that the Four Seasons one was packaged far more considerately for takeaway, with rice, meat and sauces separate. 23 Wardour St, W1D 6PW and 45 Wardour St, W1D 6PZ
C&R Cafe Restaurant
The best time to go here is Monday and Tuesday, when it does mein fan kuih, a slightly doughy, chewy pasta dish which can be had dry or in soup. Otherwise, I am a creature of habit and either get the wat ton hor (basically char kway teow in an egg sauce) or either the xo ‘carrot cake’ or the lor bak as a crispy snack. Pro-tip: if you sit close to the back you can steal Speedboat Bar’s wi-fi. 4-5 Rupert Court, W1D 6DY
Old Tree Daiwan Bee
Decent homestyle Taiwanese restaurant that moved from Golders Green about a decade ago. In winter I’ll get the beef soup but the most satisfying thing is probably the fried pork chop or chicken on rice, with pickles and a little bit of pork stew. 26 Rupert St, W1D 6DH
Lotus Garden
I used to come here for siu yuk on rice, but I recently bumped into Songsoo Kim, who recommended the prawn and chive dumplings, and a deep cut from their cheung fun menu: a crispy bean curd roll stuffed with sesame and prawn cake. I’ve never seen this item anywhere else and it’s a textural riot. Maybe one of the best single items in the whole of Chinatown. 15a Gerrard St, W1D 6JD
Unnamed Fujianese Place