London side trip - The Food

Last Updated: August 9, 1999

Overall, we were dissappointed with the food in London. We never had Fish&Chips (for better or worse), but the restaurants we ate at were expensive with worse food than we get in Waterloo restaurnages (see Prabhakar Ragde's review of K-W restaurants to find out how condemning that is). It's likely that we just got unlucky in our restaurant choices, but that just suggests that you should get good recommendations before you go.

What follows is a summary of what/where we ate and my comments.

Unknown Chinese Restaurant in Chinatown. I wish I knew the name of this place. I thought the food was bad, but my wife liked her shrimp (only L1 per shrimp!). And the waiter was rude. Alas, tip was included, so we couldn't pay back his rudeness.
The Chambeli of Russell Square. An Indian restaurant. The food was okay, but not great. And very expensive. And they wouldn't let us get vegetarian side dishes without ordering a main course (although they were willing make up larger portions of the side dishes).
Poon's Restaurant. A chain of Chinese restaurants. The warning bells went off in my head but I ignored them. This is a Chinese restaurant for non-Chinese. The chicken in my dish was low-grade, fatty meat. Worse than the Unknown Chinese Restaurant in Chinatown, but just as expensive (we went to it because it was close to our hotel).
Diwana Bhel Poori House. Recommended by our guide book. Perhaps it's just a style of Indian food that I'm unused to, but I thought it wasn't very good. It was a bit cheaper than the above 3 restaurants, but not by much.
Pizza Joints. The pizza is more expensive than in North America, but it's cheaper to eat here than most other places. The pizza is pretty standard stuff (we ate at Pizza Express and Deep Pan Pizza).
Grocery Store. After 2 days, we started buying food at the grocery store (mostly bread, somozas, and something to drink) for lunch. A quarter the price (or less) and far better than we got at the restaurants.