Cheap eats London under £15: where to actually go in 2026

London is expensive. Not unique observation. But people then conclude that eating well in London means £80 tasting menus, when actually the best deal in town is the workers menu at Quality Chop House and most Londoners haven't been.

This is the cheap-eats list I'd actually send to a friend visiting. Not "cheap" by tourist standards. £15 cap, dinner or lunch, walk-out properly fed, not regretting it.

The lunch trick

The single most useful thing to know about eating in London is: most of the good restaurants do a lunch that's half the price of dinner.

Kiln does £12 sets at the bar. Som Saa does £14. Quality Chop House — a Michelin-recommended Victorian dining room in Farringdon — does two courses for £15 weekdays. You can eat through the best of London for under a tenner per visit if you're flexible about lunch versus dinner.

The Rita's burger discourse

Rita's in Soho do a £12 cheeseburger at lunch that is, in my opinion, the best burger in central London. People get het up about Bleecker and Patty & Bun. Both are fine. Rita's is better. Order the fries and a martini and you're still under £25 for what would be a £35 dinner.

The chains that aren't a rip-off

I know it's gauche to recommend chains. But Dishoom's breakfast — £6 bacon naan, £4 chai — is genuinely good and you walk in. Don't do dinner there, the queue is insane and you can't book. Breakfast or 3pm late lunch only.

Padella gets all the cheap-eats coverage and I'm not putting it on this list because the 90-minute queue means you've spent £15 in time. The Padella in Shoreditch is much quicker if you're desperate.

The properly under-£10 tier

If £15 is the ceiling, here's what the floor looks like:

• Roti King in Euston. £8 roti canai, £10 nasi lemak. Down a flight of stairs in a Travelodge of all places.
• Faros in Stoke Newington for the £8 hummus and pita lunch.
• Casa do Frango small plates at lunch — chicken piri-piri for £9, sides £5.
• Ozone Coffee lunch sandwich at £8 in Shoreditch, properly good.
• F. Cooke pie and mash on Broadway Market, £7 with liquor.

What I'm not putting on this list

Anywhere with "modern" in the name. Anywhere that's opened in the last six months and has a 3-week wait. Anywhere where the £15 main is small enough to need a £8 side. You can spot these places on Instagram a mile off.

Finding new ones

Most of the new cheap-eats openings get announced through Eater and the trade press, but a fair number are smaller things — supper clubs, residencies, pop-ups — that don't get covered. Rifio's London this-week listings tend to pick those up because organisers are submitting them as events. The search is mental for finding pop-ups, found three new chef residencies last week alone.

A workers-menu lunch every other Friday for a year costs you the same as one ill-advised tasting menu. Choose accordingly.