Eating out for £6 or less
Four more genuinely inexpensive meals
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If you haven’t come here via @caffs_not_cafes, I'm a writer called Isaac Rangaswami and this is my Substack.
Every other week I publish an article about everyday places in London with unusual staying power, like shops, buildings, restaurants and public spaces.
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Nobody actually calls food “eats” and the word “cheap” can be problematic, because it connotes low quality or worth. I also distrust the term “cheap eats” because publications and content creators sometimes use it to describe food that isn’t actually inexpensive. Guides with dishes that cost £10, or even £15, can feel disingenuous to me.
Today’s piece is the third in an intermittent series about places that serve genuinely inexpensive food. I started researching this instalment with the goal of getting below the £3.50 mark, as the last one was about things you can eat for £4 or less.
But I realised I was getting hungry after everything I ate, so I figured it would be more useful to go a little higher instead. Still, I chose the restaurants below because they either serve or used to serve dishes for £3. So you can technically eat for £3 at three of them, but you’d likely need at least two small dishes to satisfy your mealtime hunger, or a bigger one that costs a little more.
Now that I’ve done a few of these, I’d say about £6 is currently the sweet spot to get something more substantial at a really inexpensive place in London. I think I’m going to write other lists about spots that serve filling food for around this price point, because I like working with constraints.
The same goes for the length of each of these entries, which is inspired by Instagram’s maximum caption length, a format I’ve spent years writing within and have grown strangely fond of. Most of all, I want to use this ongoing series as an excuse to visit parts of the city I haven’t been to enough. As always, these vignettes focus on what these places are like just as much as the food that they serve.
Far East
Get to Gerrard Street for 9am and you’ll find Chinatown wiping the sleep from its eyes, as delivery vans replenish its shops, bakeries and restaurants. Aside from the rooms where you can gamble, Far East is the only place open at this time, so it’s become Chinatown’s breakfast spot by default.
This diminutive restaurant has a dozen small tables and a vaulted wooden ceiling, which reminds me of the one at Vijay’s in Kilburn and of the hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall. The business has existed since 1962, and I like to think that roof could be a remnant of its oldness.
The first time I went, younger men in designer clothes with bleached hair and middle-aged men in man bags and shiny puffer jackets were eating soups, noodles and types of dim sum. There was one other solo diner aside from me, who had a tea egg and a bowl of congee, and was receiving round after round of wicker-basketed dumplings.