Eating in London

How London eats now

London is one of the best cities in the world to eat in, and the jokes about British food are about thirty years out of date. You can have Punjabi lamb chops in Whitechapel, Sichuan noodles in Soho, Nigerian suya in Peckham, a three-Michelin-star tasting menu in Chelsea and a bacon sandwich from a 1950s café, all on the same Tube network.

What trips Americans up is the system around the food: how booking works, the service charge printed on the bill, card-only counters, pubs where nobody comes to your table, and the gap between tourist-strip restaurants and the places Londoners actually go. For British dishes in general see British food; for pub etiquette, see pubs.

A rough price guide per person for a main course: $ under £15 (about $20), $$ £15–25 (about $20–33), $$$ £25–40 (about $33–53), $$$$ over £40 (about $53) or tasting menus. Menu prices already include 20% VAT.

How eating out works

Booking a table

Most sit-down restaurants take bookings online, through their own website or through platforms such as OpenTable, Resy and SevenRooms. For a well-known place on a Friday or Saturday night, book one to three weeks ahead. The hardest tables release dates in batches, often a month or two out, and go within minutes; set a reminder for the release time.

Many restaurants take a card number when you book and charge a no-show or late-cancellation fee, commonly £10–£50 (about $13–$66) a head, more at high-end places. Read the cancellation window, and cancel if your plans change.

No-booking places and queues

Many popular London restaurants keep most or all tables for walk-ins. Dishoom, the Bombay-café chain with eight London branches, is the famous example: it now takes bookings, but walk-in dinner can still mean lines out the door. Padella, the fresh-pasta counter by Borough Market, takes no bookings there: you join a virtual queue with the QR code at the door or the Dojo app and wait for your table.

The way to beat the queue is timing. Arrive before noon for lunch, by 5:30pm for dinner, or after 9:30pm. Mid-afternoon on a weekday is often walk-straight-in. Dishoom's breakfast (the bacon naan roll is the reason to go) is far easier than its dinner.

At the table

Staff will ask if you want "still, sparkling or tap" water. Tap water is free, safe and perfectly normal to ask for; "still" means bottled water you will pay for. Bread usually costs extra. Portions are smaller than American ones and refills of soft drinks are rare outside chains.

Servers in Britain are not working for tips in the American sense; they earn at least the legal minimum wage. Nobody will bring the check until you ask, because rushing you would be rude. Catch someone's eye and say "Could we get the bill, please?" At smaller places you may pay at the counter.

Service charge and tipping

Most London restaurants add a "discretionary" or "optional" service charge to the bill, usually 12.5%, sometimes 10%. If it is there, you have tipped; add nothing more. If a card machine then asks "Add a tip?", press no. Since October 2024 the law in Great Britain requires employers to pass all tips and service charges to staff without deductions.

The charge really is optional. If service was poor, you can ask for it to be removed. If there is no service charge on a table-service bill, leaving around 10% is normal. You do not tip at pubs for drinks bought at the bar, at counters, or for takeaway. More on the money page.

Card-only places

Many cafés, chains, market stalls and even some pubs now take cards and phones only, and a sign at the till will say so. Contactless card payments in the UK are usually capped at £100 (about $133) per tap; Apple Pay and Google Pay on a phone can go higher. A US card with no foreign transaction fee is the most useful thing in your wallet. Keep £20–£30 in cash for the odd old-school café or stall.

Allergies and dietary needs

London is easy for vegetarian, vegan, halal and gluten-free diets. Tell your server about any allergy before you order; restaurants must be able to tell you which of 14 major allergens are in each dish. See British food for the rules.

Borough and the food markets

Borough Market

London's most famous food market sits right beside London Bridge station (Jubilee and Northern lines, plus National Rail), under and around the railway viaducts. It is open Tuesday to Friday 10am–5pm, Saturday 9am–5pm and Sunday 10am–4pm, and closed on Mondays. Hours change around Christmas and on bank holidays, so check the market's site for those weeks.

Borough works best as a place to graze and to shop for the good stuff. Neal's Yard Dairy, on the edge of the market, is the best place in the country to taste and buy British farmhouse cheese. Among the hot food stalls you will find raclette, scotch eggs, salt beef, oysters, paella, Ethiopian stews and grilled cheese sandwiches; budget £8–£15 (about $11–$20) for a lunch you eat standing up or perched on a step.

Saturday from 11am is shoulder-to-shoulder, slow and pickpocket-friendly. Go on a weekday morning or right at Saturday's 9am opening. Southwark Cathedral next door has benches in its churchyard, which is the best spot to eat what you buy.

Borough's neighbors

Ten minutes' walk east, under the railway arches of Bermondsey, Maltby Street Market on the Ropewalk is the smaller, more local weekend version: a narrow alley of food stalls and bars that is busy on Saturdays and quieter on Sundays. Check the market's own site for this season's hours. Around it, the Bermondsey Beer Mile is a string of brewery taprooms in the arches along Druid Street and Enid Street, mostly open on weekends; it is a pub crawl, so pace yourself. Bermondsey Street has some of the best small restaurants in the area, including José, a tiny standing-room sherry and tapas bar.

The George Inn on Borough High Street, the last galleried coaching inn in London and owned by the National Trust, is the place for a pint after the market.

Broadway Market

In Hackney, between London Fields and the Regent's Canal, Broadway Market runs Saturday 9am–5pm and Sunday 10am–4pm all year. It is a neighborhood street market of bakeries, coffee, cheese and street food. Combine it with a walk along the canal and Sunday's Columbia Road Flower Market, about 20 minutes' walk south. The nearest stations are London Fields and Cambridge Heath on the Overground.

Other markets to know

• Spitalfields Market (Liverpool Street): covered market with a food court, open daily, busiest on Sundays.
• Brick Lane on Sundays: the Sunday Upmarket and Backyard Market in the old Truman Brewery are packed with street food from every continent.
• Brixton Village and Market Row: covered arcades of small Caribbean, African, Latin American and Asian restaurants and shops in South London.
• Marylebone Farmers' Market: a proper producers' market on Sunday mornings.
• Whitecross Street and Leather Lane: weekday lunchtime street-food markets for office workers near the City and Holborn. Cheap and quick.

Food halls, grand and modern

London's department-store food halls are sights in their own right and the best place to buy edible gifts. Harrods Food Halls in Knightsbridge have tiled Edwardian rooms and counters for everything from oysters to chocolate. Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly, founded in 1707 and a holder of royal warrants, is the place for tea, biscuits, jams and its famous hampers; the ground floor gets very busy before Christmas. Selfridges Foodhall on Oxford Street is more modern and has good counters to eat at.

The newer style is the street-food hall: one room with many small kitchens and shared tables. Mercato Metropolitano near Elephant & Castle is the big one, in a former paper factory. Seven Dials Market in Covent Garden and Arcade Food Hall at the foot of the Centre Point tower are handy in the West End. Eataly near Liverpool Street is the Italian one, if you know it from New York. Stalls change often.

Afternoon tea

Afternoon tea is a pot of tea with three tiers of food: finger sandwiches (cucumber, egg and cress, smoked salmon), scones with clotted cream and jam, and small cakes and pastries. Londoners treat it as an occasion, a birthday or a visit from a relative, a few times a year at most. The correct name is afternoon tea; "high tea" traditionally means a hearty early evening meal, though some hotels now use the term loosely.

The classic hotels

The Ritz's Palm Court is the most famous: tea is from £95 (about $126) for adults and £73 (about $97) for children, with sittings at 11:30am, 1:30pm, 3:30pm, 5:30pm and 7:30pm. The dress code is jacket and tie for men, no jeans or sportswear for anyone (children under 16 are exempt). Book weeks ahead for a weekend, longer around Christmas. A glass of Champagne adds from £26 (about $35).

Fortnum & Mason's Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon on Piccadilly starts at £84 (about $112) and has the best tea list in the city, with a more relaxed dress code. Other grand options include The Savoy, Claridge's, The Goring near Buckingham Palace, The Dorchester, Brown's in Mayfair and The Langham, which presents itself as one of the first hotels to serve afternoon tea after it opened in 1865. Expect a similar price bracket; check each hotel's site for current prices and dress codes.

Cheaper and different

You do not need to spend £100 a head. Many smaller hotels, museum cafés, department stores and tea rooms serve a full afternoon tea for well under half the grand-hotel price, and a "cream tea" (just scones, cream, jam and a pot of tea) is a much smaller bill. Themed teas are a London industry: Sketch in Mayfair for the design, and red double-decker bus tours that serve tea as you drive past the sights.

Sunday roast in a pub

Sunday lunch is the meal Londoners most often go out for, and a pub roast is the most British thing you can do on a Sunday afternoon. The plate: roast beef, lamb, pork or chicken, roast potatoes, seasonal vegetables, a Yorkshire pudding (a puffed, crisp batter cup) and plenty of gravy, plus horseradish with beef, mint sauce with lamb and apple sauce with pork. There is almost always a vegetarian option, often a nut roast or a pie.

Roasts are usually served from about noon until late afternoon, or until they run out. Popular pubs fill completely, so book by midweek for the following Sunday and expect a two-hour table slot. In London, a good pub roast typically costs £20–£30 (about $27–$40) for the main course.

A few London names with strong reputations for Sunday lunch:

Almost any well-run neighborhood pub with a kitchen does a decent roast. Look for a menu that changes weekly and locals booked in at 1pm; avoid places with photos of the food outside.

Curry: Brick Lane and better

London has some of the best South Asian cooking outside South Asia. The trap is Brick Lane. Its southern end, nicknamed Banglatown, was the heart of London's Bangladeshi community and still has dozens of curry houses, but many now compete with discounts and pavement touts. If someone stands outside offering you "free wine, 20% off", walk on. Go to Brick Lane for its history, the Sunday street-food markets and the 24-hour bagel shops at the north end; eat curry elsewhere.

Where to go instead

For the real community food scenes, take the Tube or train out to Southall (Punjabi, by Elizabeth line from Paddington), Tooting (South Indian and Sri Lankan, Northern line), Wembley's Ealing Road (Gujarati vegetarian) or Green Street in East Ham.

Chinatown and beyond

London's Chinatown is a few compact streets around Gerrard Street, between Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue, with red gates and lanterns overhead. It is mostly Cantonese and Hong Kong in style, with roast-meat shops (look for ducks hanging in the window), dim sum halls, bakeries and bubble-tea shops, and newer places doing Sichuan, Hunan, Taiwanese and northern Chinese food. Four Seasons on Gerrard Street has a long-standing reputation for roast duck.

The rule is simple: go where the windows are full of Chinese families, and order what you see on neighboring tables. Dim sum is a lunchtime meal. Service in Chinatown is famously brisk and many places add a service charge, so check the bill. Much of Chinatown stays open until 11pm or later.

Outside Chinatown, Queensway in Bayswater has a cluster of Cantonese restaurants, and Kingsland Road in Hoxton is known for Vietnamese pho.

Fine dining and Michelin stars

The 2026 Michelin Guide for Great Britain and Ireland was announced in Dublin in February 2026. No London restaurant gained a third star this year; the city's three-star group, which includes Core by Clare Smyth in Notting Hill and Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea, held on. Two London restaurants rose to two stars: Bonheur by Matt Abé in Mayfair and Row on 5 on Savile Row.

New one-star London restaurants in 2026 include Restaurant Gordon Ramsay High on the 60th floor of 22 Bishopsgate in the City, Tom Brown at The Capital in Knightsbridge, Michael Caines at The Stafford in St James's, Somssi by Jihun Kim at the Mandarin Oriental in Mayfair, Legado in Shoreditch and The Kerfield Arms, a pub in Camberwell. Other long-established starred names include Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, Sketch (The Lecture Room & Library), Hélène Darroze at The Connaught, The Ledbury, Kitchen Table, Hide and Ikoyi.

Several starred places closed between the 2025 and 2026 guides, so check that a restaurant is still trading before you plan around it.

What it costs and how to book

Tasting menus at the top level run from about £200 (about $266) to well over £400 (about $532) per person before wine and service charge. Wine pairings can double the bill. Most take a deposit or prepayment and release tables a month or more ahead. Lunch menus are often much cheaper than dinner and easier to get, which is the best way to try a famous kitchen on a budget.

Dress codes at most are now smart casual; a few grand hotel dining rooms state stricter rules on their sites.

Breakfast and brunch

London has two breakfast cultures. The first is the "caff" or greasy spoon: a small, no-frills café serving a full English breakfast, bacon sandwiches and mugs of strong tea, often for well under £15 (about $20). E. Pellicci on Bethnal Green Road, family-run since 1900, and the Regency Café in Westminster are the famous ones. Check hours before you go; many caffs close by mid-afternoon and some close on Sundays.

The second is brunch: Australian-style cafés with flat whites and long weekend lines, such as Caravan and Granger & Co. For a grand breakfast in a beautiful room, The Wolseley on Piccadilly is a former car showroom turned Viennese-style café that serves a proper full English.

Hotel breakfasts in London are often expensive if not included in your rate, sometimes £25 (about $33) or more. For what goes in a full English and its Scottish, Welsh and Ulster cousins, see British food.

Budget eats: meal deals, Pret and Greggs

The meal deal

The supermarket meal deal is a British institution: a sandwich or wrap, a snack (chips, which Brits call crisps, fruit or a protein pot) and a drink, for one fixed price. It is the cheapest decent lunch in London. Prices as of August 2026:

Meal deal prices change often, and some smaller "Express" and "Local" stores charge a little more. Loyalty discounts need an app sign-up; the savings are small. M&S Food and Waitrose are pricier but have the best sandwiches.

Pret, Greggs and the chains

Pret A Manger is on nearly every central London street: freshly made sandwiches, soups, salads and coffee, with clear allergen labels and a large vegetarian and vegan range. It is reliable, and it is everywhere. Greggs, the bakery chain loved across Britain, is the budget champion: its sausage roll costs about £1.35 (about $1.80), and the vegan sausage roll is just as popular. Prices can be higher at stations and airports.

Good-value sit-down chains include Wagamama (noodles), Franco Manca and Pizza Pilgrims (pizza), Honest Burgers, Nando's (peri-peri chicken) and Flat Iron (steak).

For daily budgets, see money and the budget tool.

Late-night food

London keeps earlier hours than New York. Most restaurant kitchens take their last orders between 9:30pm and 10:30pm, and many close earlier on Sundays. After the theater, a pre-theater set menu at 5:30pm or 6pm is often easier than a late supper. See London theatre.

Places that do stay open late:

• Brick Lane's bagel shops: the two famous bakeries at the north end of Brick Lane are open around the clock and sell salt-beef bagels to the post-club crowd.
• Bar Italia on Frith Street in Soho: an espresso bar that has served late-night coffee since 1949 and stays open into the small hours.
• Chinatown: many restaurants serve until 11pm or midnight.
• Edgware Road: the Lebanese and Middle Eastern strip near Marble Arch is busy until late with shawarma, grills and shisha cafés.

The Night Tube runs on Friday and Saturday nights on parts of the Victoria, Jubilee, Central, Northern and Piccadilly lines (check TfL for the current list), and night buses run every night. See London for getting around.

Pubs to eat and drink in

Pubs are where London socializes, and many serve good food. Order and pay at the bar for drinks and usually for food (give your table number); nobody will seat you. The pubs page has the full etiquette.

Historic pubs to visit for the building alone include the George Inn in Southwark, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street (rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666), the Blackfriar by the river, the riverside Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, and the flower-covered Churchill Arms in Kensington, which also serves Thai food. For a serious meal, choose a gastropub.

Neighborhoods to eat in