FOOD REVIEW: London's Hidden Gems, Food Spots & Local Secrets You Shouldn’t Miss
- Terry Young
- 8 minutes ago
- 7 min read
London defies reduction. It is, at any given moment, a dozen different cities layered atop one another, a pre-dawn fish market humming under fluorescent lights, a basement brasserie that feels as though it has been smuggled wholesale from a Paris side street, a neighborhood bookshop that doubles as a wine bar and a community living room.
The places worth knowing are rarely the ones that shout loudest. More often they are found by accident, by following a recommendation scrawled on a napkin or passed across a table between friends. What follows is a small, deliberately partial tour of some that have lodged themselves in the memory, places that reward the curious and, in most cases, the early riser.
Before the City Wakes: Billingsgate Cafe
There is a version of London that most visitors, and, frankly, most residents, will never see: the city at five in the morning, when the streets belong to delivery drivers, night-shift workers, and anyone improbable enough to have set an alarm for reasons other than catching a flight. If you number yourself among this unlikely company, make your way to the Billingsgate Cafe, tucked inside the celebrated Billingsgate Fish Market in Poplar, in the long shadow of the Canary Wharf skyscrapers.
Billingsgate is the United Kingdom's largest inland fish market, a great, weather-beaten warehouse of a place that has operated in this Poplar location since 1982, when it was relocated from its original home in the City of London. By the time the cafe opens, the market floor is already several hours into its working day, porters in white coats and wellies, the cold-room doors swinging open and shut, the smell of the sea arriving in waves. The cafe itself is a resolutely practical space: strip lighting, formica surfaces, the comfortable noise of people who have been awake since before the rest of us thought about sleeping.
The order is simple. Get the scallop and bacon roll. Yes, combining scallops with a full English breakfast is not, strictly speaking, the done thing; it sits outside the accepted grammar of the morning fry-up, but it works perfectly here, in context, surrounded by people who have been handling scallops since four o'clock. The roll arrives fat and satisfying, with tea or coffee on the side, at a price that makes you wonder how it is even possible. \
If you are unconvinced by the scallop proposition, a full English with market-fresh fish is a worthy alternative. The important thing is to arrive early. The later you get to Billingsgate, the greater the chance of encountering someone filming themselves eating there, a habit that has become, in recent years, something of an occupational hazard of the place. Set your alarm. The experience is worth every minute of lost sleep.
It is worth noting that Billingsgate's days at this site are numbered. The City of London Corporation, which still manages the market despite the site being owned by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, has agreed to relocate both Billingsgate and Smithfield Market to a new facility at Albert Island in Newham, east of London City Airport, with closure of the current site expected in or after 2028. A visit now, then, carries something of the quality of bearing witness. Go while you still can.
The Art of the Long Lunch: Brasserie Zedel
There are certain pleasures that belong specifically to the approach of summer, not the heat itself, which in London is always unreliable, but the permission that it grants. The permission to linger, to order wine at lunch without apology, to feel, for a few hours, that life is a rather more glamorous affair than the evidence usually suggests. For this particular pleasure, Brasserie Zedel remains the perennial destination of choice.
Located on Sherwood Street in Piccadilly, close enough to Piccadilly Circus that the tourist-heavy streets above ground seem to belong to a different universe, Brasserie Zedel is a grand Parisian brasserie that has been operating at the heart of London's West End since 2012. You descend a sweeping staircase from a street-level cafe into a subterranean dining room of genuinely spectacular proportions: marble columns, chandeliers, pink tablecloths, the whole magnificent apparatus of 1930s Art Deco opulence, lovingly restored and operated with brisk, cheerful professionalism.
The building itself has a history: it occupies the original Grill Room of the former Regent Palace Hotel, the Art Deco interiors of which were revitalized in the 1930s by Oliver Percy Bernard, a noted West End stage-set designer.
The menu is classical French — beef bourguignon, French onion soup, steak tartare, snails, and the set prix fixe is, for central London, almost implausibly affordable. Two courses or three, at prices that have not materially changed the value proposition since the restaurant opened. The whole enterprise encourages a certain mood of transported ease: sitting beneath the chandeliers with a carafe of house wine and a plate of something properly cooked, it is entirely possible to imagine oneself as a character in a drama set in a better era.
The Suchet-era Poirot springs to mind, or any number of other golden-age productions in which grand brasseries serve as the backdrop for civilised intrigue. The food, it should be said, actually delivers, this is not mere atmosphere. The steak hache with peppercorn sauce alone is worth the trip.
Books, Wine, and Community: BookBar
The concept, on paper, could easily have gone wrong. A bookshop and wine bar in a North London neighbourhood: it risks tipping into a certain kind of studied quaintness, the twee-ness of places that are more interested in the idea of themselves than in reality. BookBar, at 166 Blackstock Road in Islington's Highbury neighbourhood, has avoided this fate with some elegance.
The address places it in an interesting stretch of north London: Blackstock Road runs close to the site of Arsenal's former ground, Highbury Stadium, now converted into the Highbury Square residential development, with its famous Art Deco East Stand facade preserved within a complex of apartments.
The neighbourhood around it is the kind of dense, residential London that tourists rarely penetrate but that rewards a wander: Victorian terraces, local shops, the texture of a community that has not yet been entirely smoothed away. BookBar sits within this fabric comfortably, which is part of what makes it work.
Founded by Chrissy Ryan, BookBar is a bookshop, wine bar, events space and social hub, in that order of priority, though the ordering shifts depending on the hour. Bookshelves line every available surface; the wine is genuinely well chosen and generously poured; the coffee is good.
The Shelf Medicate service, bespoke book prescriptions assembled around your mood or situation, with names like 'The Sophisticated Reader' and 'The Commute Buster' - is the kind of charming, slightly eccentric touch that distinguishes a place with personality from one following a formula. Regular events bring in authors, host book clubs, and occasionally turn the floor over to a DJ night. It is, in short, a genuinely great place to drink, and to read, and to talk about what you are reading, which is the point.
North Indian Soul Food: Chaska Maska, Brockley
Do not be misled by the stock photographs of generic burgers that have, inexplicably, appeared on Chaska Maska's website. They bear no relation to what is actually being served at this small, excellent Indian restaurant on Brockley Road in south-east London, and what is actually being served is some of the best food of its kind in the city.
Chaska Maska draws its inspiration from the food of northern India, a culinary tradition that, in its best forms, combines the comfort of slow-cooked pulses and creamy paneer dishes with the sharp, lively flavours of street food eaten standing up at a market stall. The menu here focuses on light, fresh interpretations of staple dishes, the palak paneer arrives with real brightness, the dal makhani (black dal, slow-cooked for hours) has the depth of something that has been properly laboured over, alongside a selection of street food snacks that are among the most carefully rendered in London.
Two dishes in particular demand attention. The vada pav — a spiced potato patty in a soft, toasted bun, served with chutneys, is a street-food staple of Mumbai that has, over time, become associated with the whole of western India, and Chaska Maska's version is exemplary: the potato filling spiced and fluffy, the bun properly toasted, the chutneys calibrated to cut through the richness. The rajma masala, kidney beans cooked down with tomatoes, onions and a careful hand with spice, is the kind of dish that demonstrates what distinguishes a kitchen that genuinely understands its source material from one that is merely approximating it.
Brockley is not an area that visitors to London typically think to seek out, but Chaska Maska is reason enough to make the trip.
Pelican House, Bethnal Green
The final entry on this list is of a different order to the preceding ones. Pelican House is not a restaurant or a bar in any conventional sense, and whether you are able to visit depends in part on whether you receive an invitation to one of its events. But if an invitation arrives, accept it.
Founded in 2021 by a coalition of fourteen progressive organizations, and located in Bethnal Green a few minutes' walk from the Underground and Overground stations, Pelican House describes itself as a social center for worker organizing, movement building, and experimental arts and culture. It is run as a cooperative by its fifty-odd resident organizations, operates as a not-for-profit, and offers affordable workspace to groups committed to social justice, environmental action, and collective organizing.
The building hosts a rolling programme of events: fundraisers, film screenings, talks, workshops, community meals, and parties that feel genuinely, uncomplicatedly fun rather than performatively radical.
There is a bar, and it is cheap. There is a large courtyard of the kind that encourages exactly the sort of long conversation that city living often makes difficult, the kind that begins with a glass of something cold and ends, some hours later, when someone remembers there are trains to catch.
The programming includes an all-abilities Muay Thai class, a trans-led legal practice that offers advice to those who might not otherwise be able to access it, and occasional union fundraiser barbecues that combine the serious with the social in the way that the best community institutions always manage.
What Pelican House demonstrates, in the most practical possible terms, is that community and venue do not have to be separate concerns, that a building can be a place where people eat and drink and dance, and also a place where they organize, learn their legal rights, and take care of one another. The two things, it turns out, are not in tension. They have simply been made to feel that way. Pelican House is evidence that they are not.
London repays those who go looking for it in the right spirit, not the spirit of the itinerary or the must-see list, but the spirit of the early morning walk or the last-minute invitation. The city has an inexhaustible appetite for the unexpected. It helps, occasionally, to set your alarm.
