London food | What the city really cooks and eats

This is a page about food, not a list of places. Foodies has no restaurant listings, no reviews, no star ratings, no rankings, no bookings and no venue map, none of those things exist in the app, so you will not find them here either. What follows is what London cooks and eats, and an honest description of what the app shows you when you open it there.

What London actually tastes like

London's food is best understood as two things at once: an old, specific English cooking built around roasting, baking and preserving, and one of the widest immigrant food cultures in the world layered directly on top of it. Neither half explains the city on its own, and the interesting cooking usually happens where they touch.

The English layer is genuinely distinctive once you stop apologising for it. Roasting meat and making gravy from the pan. Suet and shortcrust pastry. Smoking and curing fish. Baking that runs from a plain loaf to Christmas fruitcake by way of scones and crumble. Preserving in vinegar and sugar, piccalilli, chutney, marmalade, because this was a cold, wet country with a short growing season long before it was anything else.

The other layer is not a garnish. Bangladeshi and Sylheti cooking around Brick Lane, Punjabi cooking in Southall, South Indian and Sri Lankan food in Tooting, Turkish grill cooking along Green Lanes, Cantonese in Soho's Chinatown, West African cooking in Peckham, Caribbean food that gave the city jerk, curry goat and the patty, Levantine cooking along the Edgware Road, Cypriot bakeries in the north, Vietnamese in the east. Curry is not an import to English food any more; it is a domestic tradition with its own British history, dishes invented here, and an entire vocabulary that exists nowhere else.

What London does not have is a single defining dish, and that is the point. It has a pub roast on Sunday, a full cooked breakfast on Saturday, fish fried in batter, and a hundred parallel food cultures that treat those as the neighbours' cooking rather than the national anthem.

How the city shops

London shops in three registers. The supermarket does the volume. Neighbourhood greengrocers, halal butchers, Turkish and South Asian supermarkets and Caribbean grocers do the interesting work, and they are usually cheaper, not dearer, for produce, spices, rice, pulses and herbs bought in quantities that assume you are actually cooking. Weekend farmers' markets and street food markets do the rest.

The single best habit in London is to shop where a cuisine you like is cooked for at home. A Turkish supermarket sells better and cheaper parsley, yoghurt, tomatoes and flat breads than most alternatives. A South Asian grocer sells whole spices with a turnover fast enough that they still smell of something, plus onions and coriander in quantities that make sense. A Caribbean grocer has the scotch bonnets, thyme and green bananas. None of that requires knowing a single shop name; it requires walking the high street of almost any London neighbourhood with your eyes open.

Buy whole spices and toast them. Ground spice loses its volatile aromatics within months, which is why supermarket curry powder tastes flat. Whole cumin, coriander, cardamom and cinnamon from a shop with fast turnover, toasted in a dry pan and ground as you need them, is the single biggest upgrade available to anyone cooking South Asian food at home in this city.

The rhythm of an eating day

Breakfast is split. Weekdays are coffee and something portable; the full cooked breakfast, eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, grilled tomato, toast, is a weekend and hangover institution rather than a daily one.
Lunch is short. Roughly noon to two, usually eaten fast. This is a sandwich-and-desk city more than a sit-down-lunch city.
Tea, in two senses. Afternoon tea with scones and cake is a genuine tradition but an occasional one. Across much of the country “tea” also simply means the evening meal, eaten early.
Dinner runs seven to nine. Earlier than Paris, much earlier than Madrid. Kitchens in most places stop taking orders around ten.
Sunday lunch is the fixed point. Roast meat, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, gravy, a couple of vegetables, eaten in the early afternoon and followed by doing nothing at all. If you eat one meal on a London weekend, eat this one.

What to eat, by season

The British growing season is short and sharp, which is precisely why its produce is worth chasing. Several of these windows are measured in weeks.

Seasonal British produce and dishes through the London year
Season	What is genuinely good	The dish it belongs to
Winter	Seville oranges in January and February, forced rhubarb, brassicas, root vegetables, mussels	Marmalade, rhubarb crumble, braises, the Sunday roast at its best
Spring	Wild garlic in March and April, Jersey Royal potatoes, English asparagus from late April, spring lamb	Wild garlic in anything green, new potatoes with butter, asparagus with a soft egg
Summer	Strawberries, elderflower, gooseberries, broad beans, peas, tomatoes, currants	Strawberries and cream, elderflower cordial, summer pudding
Autumn	Blackberries, cooking apples, plums, damsons, game, sweetcorn, wild mushrooms	Apple and blackberry crumble, chutney, roast game, bonfire-night food

Two dates worth knowing. English asparagus traditionally runs from around St George's Day in late April to midsummer and then stops, and the imported version outside that window is a different vegetable. Seville oranges appear for only a few weeks after Christmas, which is why marmalade-making is a January ritual rather than a whim.

The dishes worth learning to cook

A roast dinner, timed backwards

The roast is not difficult; it is a scheduling problem. Work backwards from when the meat comes out, because it must rest for twenty to thirty minutes, and that rest is exactly when the potatoes crisp, the Yorkshire puddings rise in a very hot oven and the gravy gets made in the roasting tin. Parboil the potatoes and rough up their edges before they go into hot fat, the broken surface is the crust.

A curry built from whole spices

Toast and grind your own, cook the onions far longer than feels reasonable, fry the spice paste until the oil separates, and only then add liquid. That one sequence separates a curry that tastes cooked from one that tastes stirred.

Something preserved

Marmalade in January, chutney in September. Both are the same idea, capture a glut with sugar and acid, and both make a cold country's larder make sense.

A crumble, once, properly

Fruit, sugar, a rubbed-in topping of flour, butter and sugar. Baked until the juice comes up through the crust. It is the easiest good dessert in the British repertoire and it is almost impossible to ruin; our dessert guide explains why the ratios work.

What Foodies shows you here

In London, Nearby is a feed of posts from people around you, a Sunday roast, a curry someone finally got right, a haul from a Saturday market. Posts may carry an approximate coordinate that is snapped to a grid of roughly a kilometre before storage, so the app knows a square of the city, never an address, and it never shows a venue.

There are no restaurant listings, reviews, ratings, rankings or bookings in Foodies. In a city with this many parallel food cultures, the honest value of a local feed is that it shows you what your neighbours are cooking, which is how most people here actually discover a cuisine they had never cooked before. See how the feed works for the ranking detail, or the product overview for what the app is and is deliberately not.

Post what you cooked, wherever you are

Foodies is the social network for food: share the plate in front of you, follow cooks near you, and save what you want to make again into collections that still make sense in six months. Free on iPhone and iPad, no ads in your feed, end-to-end encrypted messages.

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Frequently asked questions

What food is London actually known for?

Two traditions at once. The English one: roast dinners, a full cooked breakfast, fish fried in batter, pies, baking from scones to fruitcake, and preserving in sugar and vinegar. And an immigrant food culture as wide as any in the world, Bangladeshi, Punjabi, South Indian and Sri Lankan, Turkish, Cantonese, West African, Caribbean, Levantine, Cypriot and Vietnamese cooking are all long-established parts of how the city eats.

When is the Sunday roast eaten?

Early afternoon, generally between about noon and half past three, rather than in the evening. It is roast meat with roast potatoes, gravy, vegetables and, with beef, Yorkshire pudding. It is the one fixed communal meal in the English week and the single most worthwhile thing to eat on a London weekend.

When is English asparagus in season?

Traditionally from around St George's Day in late April to midsummer, and then it stops. The season is genuinely short, which is why it is worth eating repeatedly while it is on. Imported asparagus outside that window is a different vegetable with a different flavour.

Where do Londoners buy the best ingredients?

Usually not the supermarket. Neighbourhood greengrocers, halal butchers, Turkish and South Asian supermarkets and Caribbean grocers sell better produce, spices, pulses, rice and herbs at lower prices, in quantities that assume you are cooking. Shopping where a cuisine you like is cooked for at home is the most reliable habit in London food shopping.

Does Foodies show restaurants in London?

No. There are no restaurant listings, reviews, ratings, rankings, bookings or venue maps anywhere in Foodies. Nearby shows posts from people around you, with any location snapped to roughly one kilometre before it is stored, so it shows the plates people in the city are sharing rather than a map of places to eat.

What is the easiest British dish to learn first?

A crumble. Fruit under a rubbed-in topping of flour, butter and sugar, baked until the juice bubbles up through the crust. After that, a roast dinner, which is not technically hard but is a timing exercise, because the meat has to rest for twenty to thirty minutes while the potatoes crisp and the gravy is made in the tin.

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What London really eats.