The Kitchen
Everything here is a real recipe with real temperatures. Nothing needs a restaurant kitchen — a pan, an oven, and something to drink while you wait.
11 showing · 444 plates · 15 drinks
London drinks standing up. The pub is the unit of measure: you order at the bar, you pay by the round, and nothing arrives unasked except the bag of crisps somebody tore down the seam and laid flat in the middle of the table. Food is a decision, not a courtesy. A scotch egg and a pickled onion at six, a ploughman's if you're settling in, a salt beef beigel at three because the pub shut hours ago. There is no special word for it. It's just pub snacks.
Battered Sav and Chips · London
A bright red sausage dunked in chip-shop batter, chips, curry sauce in a tub. No apology anywhere in it. This is 11:40pm food, eaten from the paper on a bus stop bench with vinegar running down your wrist.
Where you'd actually eat it: Any chippy from Deptford to Dagenham, ordered after last orders. The curry sauce is a chip shop invention and it is not Indian food. Drink: whatever is left in the can on the walk home.
From behind the bar: Fry the chips twice: 275F/135C to cook them, 375F/190C to color them. One fry gives you limp chips and a sad walk home.
Crispy Pig's Ears · London
Simmered soft, pressed cold, cut into ribbons and fried until they buckle and crunch. Cartilage down the middle, crisp at the edges. Salt and vinegar, nothing else. The cheapest part of the pig, sold as a bar snack.
Where you'd actually eat it: The offal-minded bars around Columbia Road, Bermondsey and Soho put these out by the bowl. Drink: dry cider, fino sherry, or a cold lager. Anything that resets your mouth for the next handful.
From behind the bar: Dry the strips on paper for ten full minutes before frying. Wet cartilage dropped in hot oil spits like a firework and it will find your forearm.
Black Pudding · London
Blood sausage sliced thick and fried until the outside cracks. Fat, oats, iron, pepper. English mustard and a pickled onion, no plate required. Cheap, dark, and better than it has any right to be.
Where you'd actually eat it: Butchers' shops and pub kitchens across the city. Northern by origin, eaten everywhere in London by the lunchtime drinkers. Drink: a pint of bitter, or a stout if it is raining, which it is.
From behind the bar: Wait for a dry crust before you flip. Poking it apart halfway through frying gives you black pudding gravel and a pan you will hate.
Stamp and Go · London
Salt cod, scotch bonnet, scallion and thyme in a loose batter, spooned straight into hot oil. Crisp edges, soft middle, salty enough to keep you drinking. Jamaicans call them stamp and go, for eating on your feet.
Where you'd actually eat it: Caribbean counters and takeaway hatches around Brixton and Peckham, sold in threes in a paper bag. Drink: Red Stripe, or a rum and Ting if the night is clearly going somewhere.
From behind the bar: Taste the soaked cod before it goes anywhere near the batter. Still aggressive means another few hours in fresh water, no arguing.
Scotch egg · London
Boiled egg in a jacket of sausage meat, breadcrumbed and fried. The whole argument is the yolk: soft in the middle, or you have made a meatball. Cut in half at the bar so everyone can see you got it right.
Where you'd actually eat it: Fortnum & Mason claim it, 1738. You eat it standing at the bar with a pint of bitter, cut in half, mustard on the side. Half of London's better pubs make their own now.
From behind the bar: The second breading coat is not optional. One coat splits in the oil and you lose the yolk to the fryer.
pork scratchings · London
Pork skin, dried hard, rendered slow, then blasted until it blisters. Salt, fat and violence. The bar-clip snack that has broken more teeth than any pint glass.
Where you'd actually eat it: Black Country by birth, London by distribution. Comes in a blue bag off the clip behind the bar, eaten with a dark mild or a bitter, dentistry at your own risk.
From behind the bar: Overnight drying does all the real work. Wet skin steams in the oven and you end up with pork chews.
whitebait · London
Tiny whole fish, floured with cayenne and fried hard. Heads, tails, the lot. Once a whole Victorian ritual on the Thames, now the thing you order first while the table decides.
Where you'd actually eat it: The Greenwich whitebait dinners ran into the 1890s and the Trafalgar Tavern still serves the fish. Riverside, brown bread and butter, something cold and white in the glass.
From behind the bar: Sieve off the loose flour before frying. Otherwise you're deep-frying flour, and the oil is sludge by the second batch.
scampi · London
Langoustine tails in breadcrumbs, fried, eaten with tartare and too much lemon. The basket version is pub carpet nostalgia. Made with the actual shellfish it is genuinely very good.
Where you'd actually eat it: Basket scampi is a carpeted-pub institution; the serious version turns up in the old-guard rooms around St James's. Lager, malt vinegar, absolutely no ceremony.
From behind the bar: Most pub scampi is reformed minced whitefish. Real langoustine costs more and tastes like it; monkfish is the best cheap stand-in — firm, sweet, holds the crumb.
Bombay mix (chivda) · London
Fried gram flour noodles, peanuts, lentils and curry leaves in a bag of chili and turmeric dust. Sold in half the pubs in London and it will catch you out around pint four.
Where you'd actually eat it: Corner shops, cash-and-carries and pub snack racks all over town; the good stuff is Wembley and Green Street. Bag torn open flat on the table, dusty fingers, cold lager.
From behind the bar: Sev needs an extruder press, so everyone buys it. Read the packet — some brands fry in ghee or add milk powder, which kills the vegan claim.
onion bhaji · London
Sliced onion bound in spiced gram flour and fried into a ragged tangle. Gram flour and onion, nothing else — it was always vegan, nobody ever made a thing of it.
Where you'd actually eat it: Brick Lane and Whitechapel curry houses, ordered with a pint of Cobra before anything else lands. Also the thing that turns up on every pub curry night in the city.
From behind the bar: Standard mint chutney is made with yogurt and is not vegan. Blend cilantro, green chili, lime and salt instead and lose nothing.
salt and vinegar crisps · London
The default. Potato sliced thin, fried, salted, soured. Bag torn down the seam and laid flat in the middle of the table so everybody can reach without asking.
Where you'd actually eat it: On the clip behind every bar in London. Worth knowing: cheese and onion nearly always contains dairy, and some salt and vinegar brands carry lactose. Read the bag.
From behind the bar: Bagged crisps get their bite from sodium diacetate, not vinegar. Vinegar powder is the home equivalent; a soak alone gives a softer, rounder sour.