8 tips to eat like a king in London without breaking the bank
Money-saving meals and restaurants that don't scrimp on flavour
It can be especially difficult to know where to eat in London, not least with inviting pubs on every street corner and such a variety of cuisine seemingly every two steps. Likewise, with everyone recommending a few different places, it can be quite difficult to cut through the noise to find good food and — perhaps most pressingly in these cash-strapped times — at good prices.
Somewhere in that noise you'll find places doing excellent food at lower prices than you might think – there are a few tricks of the trade and things to know so that will help you eat like a king in London without paying a king's ransom for the privilege. Here are eight ways to eat well in London without the need to remortgage your house.
1. Take advantage of a set menu at a place that usually costs double
My first trick: some of London's most in-demand restaurants run fixed-price menus using the same kitchen, chefs and ingredients as the main menu. You're just a little limited by the items you can have – it is a "set" menu after all.
The Devonshire, Soho
The Devonshire in Soho, just behind Piccadilly Circus, is an excellent example. Currently rated as the UK's #1 gastropub (in no small part thanks to its penchant for selling a reputed 20,000 pints of Guinness a week), it built its reputation on quality meat and chips, which seem to be its bread and butter on the à la carte menu.
However, if you go in any time Monday to Saturday or for a Sunday lunch, then you can get a no-choice two-course set menu for £25, or a full three courses for £29. That nets you a prawn and langoustine cocktail starter, a main of skirt steak, served medium rare, duck fat chips and a pot of béarnaise, and a sticky toffee pudding as a third course.
The prawn and langoustine cocktail is full of sizeable prawns, with a tangy Marie Rose sauce, and is presented nicely in a retro-inspired cocktail glass. The steak comes medium rare and melts, clearly rested properly rather than rushed out, and the chips are especially good: crispy outside, fluffy inside and well seasoned without going overboard. Upgrade to three courses and a sticky toffee pudding follows — compact rather than a huge slab, but light, with a rich toffee sauce and a scoop of vanilla ice cream that balances it well. It's worth noting that a 12.5% service charge is added on top, as is customary with a lot of London restaurants these days.
It's notoriously difficult to get a reservation at The Devonshire for peak times, such as a weekend, with slots going live on a Thursday at 10:30am for three weeks in advance – pick a day and time, and go for it like you would a booking for a Glastonbury headliner.
On a Saturday afternoon at the end of lunch service, the pub was buzzing in its main dining room (to the point it was quite loud) which is something to bear in mind. But service remained especially attentive for water and an excellent free bread service. A weekday afternoon may give you a quieter experience.
2. Bring your own bottle of wine for free
Drink price can add £15-30 per-head to a bill before you've eaten anything, given the cost of a bottle of wine. Some restaurants will however waive any corkage fees if you bring your own bottle in on select nights, and serve it to you as if it's one of their own. You end up with a bill just for food, rather than one mounting up with drinks costs as the evening progresses.
The Cadogan Arms on the King's Road in Chelsea does exactly this every Monday: bring your own bottle (capped at one 75cl bottle per person) and it'll be served with zero markup. For a pub with a genuinely serious wine list, that's a significant saving — a decent bottle from a supermarket, wine merchants or your own collection replaces what would otherwise be a £30+ line item. It doesn't apply on Bank Holidays from my reading, so check the calendar before you turn up with a bottle under your arm.
The food from the Cadogan Arms also backs up its venerable reputation. In terms of starters, the lamb ribs, which are pressure-cooked for 24 hours before a quick finish in the deep fryer, come out succulent with real crackle on the outside; the scotch egg is the best I've had, properly seasoned and well-salted with a wonderfully runny yolk, and the crab toast is full of fresh seafood flavour with a creamy sauce to match.
For mains, the ham, egg and chips is the star and what a lot of people go for. Treacle and mustard-glazed ham that falls off the bone, alongside triple-cooked chips with an excellent texture outside and inside and a spiced pineapple ketchup that gets the balance of heat and fruit just right. The fish and chips elevate a pub staple with excellent mushy peas, a thin, crispy batter and a proper tartare sauce with just the right amount of tartness. The cod loin features a rich, buttery sauce with leeks that matches well with the fresh and surprisingly meaty fish, while a side of Jersey Royal potatoes have a flavour all of their own.
Puddings don't let up either: a rich sticky toffee pudding with clotted cream, a well-made crumble with a proper homemade crumb, and a cherry trifle with thick whipped cream, plenty of sponge and just enough cherry jelly to cut through was genuinely the standout. Service is attentive without hovering — our waiter, Lizzy, was genuinely a delight, making the 15% charge a justifiable extra — and the whole thing feels worth the price tag once you factor in the setting and quality, corkage saving or not.
3. Hunt down a lunch menu
Lots of bars and restaurants often run a near-invisible daytime deal, because a dining room that's empty at 1pm and packed at 9pm is still a dining room they'd rather not waste. As such, you can snag a bargain by dining at 'off peak' times.
I caught The Blues Kitchen in Camden towards the end of lunch service on a Friday, when it wasn't too busy — the lunch menu runs 12-4pm on weekdays, and dishes that would run £16-18 on the evening menu are a flat £10 at lunch, with no extras bundled in.
I went for a fried chicken sandwich and a beef brisket dip, £10 each, with a pint of IPA on the side for £6.90, with the fried chicken being juicy inside and extra crispy on the outside, giving a surprising kick from the sauce and its coating. The beef brisket dip is something I'd had on a previous trip, but another one of my party ordered it, and its meat is packed solid into a brioche bun. It falls apart on its own, let alone when paired with a rich and thick beefy gravy for dipping. For sides, a £5 corn bread is lovely, feeling like a savoury sponge cake with a rich honey butter, while the mac and cheese is a sizeable portion and impresses on flavour and quantity. One thing worth flagging: there is a 12.5% service charge, so factor that into the final bill.
A similar trick is running at Boxhall in Liverpool Street if you're headed Central via East: any dish from one of its nine resident kitchens — from Beef on the Block's Philly cheesesteak buns to Club Mexicana's tacos — paired with a drink, for £20. It's on Sunday to Wednesday from 5pm, running from 2nd August to 11th November, ordered via a QR code with no app needed. That's ideal for after-work dining without much of the expense at a prime location that's sure to have some fun evening vibes as the summer wraps up.
4. Let an app tell you what's about to go to waste
At the end of service, high-quality food that hasn't sold isn't thrown away. It's sometimes bagged up and sold at a fraction of its price through surplus-food apps, since restaurants would rather recoup a few pounds than nothing at all. The catch is that stock is unpredictable and first-come, first-served, so it rewards a bit of habit-forming.
Too Good To Go is the best-known version of this and is an app I can attest to using probably at least twice or three times a month when I'm in London. Sometimes as a bit of fun, but otherwise I've stuck to a few places that I keep returning to for an ideal blend of cost and quality. Bags typically go for £3-5 and represent stock worth three or four times that at full price, but they're released at specific windows (usually towards closing time) and can sell out within minutes, so it's worth setting an alert on the app for your local spots.
I picked up a bag from Roni's in West Hampstead, part of a North London institution of bagel bakeries you'll find in Hampstead, Belsize Park and Primrose Hill, for £3.79 that contained a salt beef bagel, a schnitzel sandwich and an almond croissant. Against a combined menu value of roughly £20-22, that's about as good as this trick gets. On some days, the bag can be £4.99, but that's still a bargain.
The salt beef bagel is the real standout here, and goes for nearly £7 on its own, with a healthy quantity of beef that melts, a sharp pickle and mustard combo, all on a freshly baked bagel — I think is one of the best in London. I always stop by Roni's when I can, and it's usually that bagel that keeps me coming back.
Sticking with north London, Euphorium's Hampstead branch is one of the better-priced bags around at £5, in one of London's pricier postcodes. In the past, mine have come with croissants and blueberry muffins, though what you get is always the luck of the draw, which is exactly why it's worth checking in regularly with a few favourite spots rather than relying on just one.
Crumbs and Dollies by Carnaby Street sits at the premium end of Too Good To Go, with bags going for £8 and a choice of cookies or cakes when you collect. I went for cookies and got two Victoria sponge and two chocolate, which were thick, gooey New York-style cookies, working out to roughly half price or better per cookie.
The next time I went, there wasn't any choice, and it was just cakes in a variety of flavours. Red velvet, Biscoff, chocolate and birthday cake were in my box of four, with thick icing and a moist sponge the name of the game. It's a popular bag, so the same rule applies: set an alert if you want to be sure of grabbing one.
5. Book the first table of the day for half price
In a similar vein to a lunch menu, there are times of the day when restaurants can be empty, so you can snag a bargain by using an app if you're happy to dine in a certain window.
First Table gets you 50% off the food bill (drinks are excluded) for a group of 2-4 people, on the condition you book a slotted sitting of breakfast, lunch or dinner at a participating restaurant, and pay a small non-refundable booking fee (around £6 per person) to secure it. It's essentially a way of paying for reliability rather than the meal itself — restaurants use it to guarantee footfall in their quietest slot, and you get half-price food in exchange for eating a little earlier than you might otherwise choose to.
I tried it at Dirty Bones on Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street, sharing a Mac Daddy burger and a side of cheesy truffle fries with some friends. That's £27 of food at full price. What you get is a full metal tray of loaded truffle fries and a burger that blends quality shortrib with mac and cheese for good measure. The cost is cut almost in half by First Table, before service charge, making it much more affordable for quality eats if you're happy to pay for drinks.
6. Find the pub that never tried to be fancy
Some of London's best pints and simplest, most honest food comes from pubs that have deliberately stayed small and unpolished. You won't find a gastropub makeover, small plates menu, nor any attempt to compete on décor. The value comes in the honesty of its offering.
The Southampton Arms in Kentish Town is my model for this: a genuine hole-in-the-wall, with no fruit machines, no TV screens and no food beyond simple snacks like scotch eggs and pork pies, alongside an ever-rotating list of cask ales and ciders sourced from small, independent breweries. It'd be right at home in a far more expensive setting.
I tried both the Southampton Arms and its sister pub, The Pocket on Upper Street in Islington (both are run by the same folks) — both rammed later on a Friday and Saturday afternoon respectively, with the craft pints flowing, and I imagine a shortage of pork pies and hot hog roast rolls to go with it.
Your best bet, as I find out, is to go early, although even then that may not be enough. The Southampton opens at 12pm, although the hog roast roll wasn't ready until nearly 2pm, a full two hours after opening, but it was worth the wait — packed with pulled pork, apple and a properly sharp mustard, for £8.95 – considering it's a stone's throw from Hampstead Heath, that feels surprisingly reasonable. A standard pint under a certain ABV comes in at £5.44, so a roll and a pint lands comfortably under £15 in a pub with good atmosphere once people pile in.
Further east, The Grapes in Limehouse leans into the same spit-and-sawdust appeal, but with a genuinely remarkable backstory. It's a 500-year-old riverside pub name-checked by Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, and it's currently leaseholder-owned by Sir Ian McKellen. Yep — it's Gandalf's gaff, with his very own Lord of the Rings staff taking pride of place behind the bar.
It's unpretentious by design rather than accident — no table reservations, a proper local feel despite the history — and does a lunch menu with sandwiches for under £10 alongside its famous fish and chips. It's further proof that "affordable" in London doesn't have to mean compromising on quality.
7. Grab a proper sandwich, not a supermarket meal deal
London's best cheap lunches are often standing-room-only counters where the ingredients do all the talking. No service charge, no waiting staff, just quality and speed from people who've been doing one thing for decades.
Brick Lane's Beigel Bake has been doing this since the 1970s: open 24 hours a day, cash-friendly, and serving salt beef bagels for a few pounds. There's a queue out the door at 3am just as readily as at midday — a genuine only-in-London institution. A salt beef beigel here feels like a rite of passage, with salt beef that requires no effort to chew, cut through with the sharpness of mustard and a hefty pickle.
For something different, Dal Fiorentino in Fitzrovia applies the same logic to Tuscan schiacciata sandwiches — a thinner, crispier cousin of focaccia. Its menu splits into gourmet and standard ranges, each priced in small and large sizes. I went for the Michelangelo at £8.50 (large), which comes loaded with parma ham, stracciatella cheese and peppery rocket on fresh schiacciata bread, plus olive oil and a truffle cream for good measure. Even the smaller-sized version would put it roughly in line with a supermarket meal deal for noticeably higher-quality food.
On a separate visit, I tried the Boccaccio from the gourmet menu, smaller at £7 — bresaola, pecorino, rocket and extra virgin olive oil. Even at the smaller size, it was sizeable enough to share between two, and wonderfully fresh.
8. Order for the table, not for yourself
A final trick: if you can, order a sharing platter. It might seem like a hefty up-front cost, but it's usually a surefire way of feeding three or four people in one fell swoop if you're happy using fingers.
Poor Boys in Kingston, a New Orleans-inspired restaurant known for its portion sizes, is a good example of this. I went for the Surf and Turf Sharer at £56.95, and got a genuinely huge amount of food, with fried shrimp, fried crab, fried calamari, sublime beef brisket burnt ends and excellent fried chicken that's easily enough for multiple people to share. Split four ways, that's roughly £14-15 a head for a spread that would easily cost double ordered as individual mains.
It's also available as takeaway, which opens up a nice variation on the trick: Hampton Court is just over the river, so a sharer ordered to go makes for a genuinely great summer picnic. Sharing the same food in the grounds of a Tudor palace rather than a restaurant booth also means you waive any form of additional tip or service charge for eating inside. Bring a cooler of drinks or wine in an insulated water bottle, and you've got an upmarket picnic with quality food.
None of these tips and tricks require giving up on quality, and if anything, just need a little bit of forward planning. A restaurant booking made on the right day, an app downloaded, or knowing which night of the week to turn up at a favourite spot is all it takes. London's expensive reputation is largely true if you eat where most of the queue goes. Look slightly to the side of that queue, and the same city gets a lot more affordable, and even more interesting than you first thought.
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