Some things you can eat for £4 or less
Some things you can eat for £4 or less
Five very inexpensive small meals and snacks
Hello and welcome to Wooden City, a newsletter about London.
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.
Wooden City is a reader-supported publication and paid subscribers get much more. This includes access to maps, full articles and an archive of material covering over 170 places so far.
Today’s newsletter is a spiritual sequel to my piece about eating out for under £5.31. When I started researching that article, I wanted to look at restaurants that sell food for under £5 – until I realised that pie and mash now costs more than that. I also focused on places where you can sit down inside to eat.
For this follow-up, I’ve expanded my remit to include takeaway spots. But even without the constraint of dining rooms, I’ve been reminded that eating cheaply in London nowadays often simply means eating less.
So these restaurants serve things you can eat for £4 or under, but not every dish is a meal’s worth of food. Two of the most meal-like things are affordable mainly because they involve loads of chips, just as a budget biryani is mostly rice. There are also two kinds of soup, always a nourishing yet economical option, perhaps because water is even cheaper than a pile of carbs.
Once you open this topic out to smaller meals and snacks, then you can talk about all those handheld, pastry-type dishes, such as buns, patties, gözleme, shingaras and empanadas. I haven’t included those here, partly because Vittles has recently published a bible of such dishes. But I do plan to write a follow-up about food like that later; I might also write one exclusively about places that serve this genre in Whitechapel.
So in the meantime, please see this piece as part of an ongoing series. As before, I’ve tried to focus on the function and atmosphere of each affordable space just as much as the food.
Michael's Fish Bar – chips
I spent a few boiling July and August evenings eating dinner a gherkin’s throw from Michael’s Fish Bar, a neighbourhood chip shop in Leyton. Going there repeatedly made me think just how hard it must be to work in a kitchen during the summer, because it was twice as hot inside as it was on the street.
A colour grader called Tim had sent me a DM about Michael’s a few weeks before, partly because he thought I might like its beautiful and fading acrylic signage. His recommendation came at the perfect time, because I had just started looking for a historical restaurant that sold something for £3.
At Michael’s, that something is either a chip roll or a small portion of chips, but it wouldn’t be fair to call either small. Everything I’ve eaten here has been portioned with generosity; the prices feel particularly competitive if you stretch to a “special small fish and chips”, which costs £7.50.
Inside, the decor is straightforward: the room is seatless and the greeny beige wall tiles have no pictures on them, aside from a cluster of notices and adverts for local businesses next to where you pay. The elegant frying range has a mint green strip running through the middle of it; above that is the plastic menu board, broadcasting things such as cod, haddock and curry pancake rolls.
I like Michael's Fish Bar because it has a villagey feel. It shares a small shopping parade with a launderette and a big tree, and it attracts a steady trade of people arriving by foot and by bike. If there aren’t other customers in there when you arrive, someone usually walks in behind you, and sometimes there’s a queue spilling out of the door, which I gather is much longer on Fridays.
Usually I prefer chip shops where you can dine in, because that makes it easier to eat your purchase at its crispiest, rather than it steaming inside the paper on your way home. But Michael’s has the next best thing: a set of nearby benches where you can sit and eat.
The Pavement, Hainault Rd, London E11 1EG