Where to eat in Shoreditch
54 places
Planning a whole day here? Read the Shoreditch area guide.
Appalachia
£££The cooking of the Appalachian mountains - cornbread madeleines, poussin with grits - from a chef who came out of Smoking Goat, at a counter wrapped round an open kitchen.
Banh Mi Kêu
£Bánh mì made to order rather than pre-wrapped, which is the whole difference.
Beigel Bake
£Salt beef bagels around the clock on Brick Lane, sold through a hatch to a queue of people at every hour a person can be hungry.
Open 24 hours, every day. The queue at 3am is a genuine London sight.
Blacklock
££Chops pressed under a vintage Blacklock iron AND a proper dry-aged steak list from £16, at prices that undercut every other chophouse in central London.
Brat
£££Tomos Parry cooking over open fire above a Shoreditch pub, built around whole turbot in a custom grill.
Brick Lane Market
£Vintage clothing, records and street food down the lane and through the Truman Brewery yards - the busiest and least curated of the east London Sunday markets.
Sundays are the main event. The Truman Brewery yards run smaller markets on Saturdays too.
Bubala
£££Entirely vegetarian and almost never described that way - the point is that nobody at the table notices what is missing.
City Spice
££The Brick Lane curry house that gets named most often when people argue about which of them is still worth eating at.
Discount Suit Company
££Opened in January 2014 in a suit tailor's old store room off Petticoat Lane and kept the name: bare brick, old joists and classically inspired cocktails to Northern Soul.
Dishoom
££The Irani cafes of old Bombay recreated in careful detail, and the bacon naan roll that made it a breakfast destination as much as a dinner one.
Any party size can book before 6pm; after 6pm bookings are for groups of six or more only. Most tables are held back for walk-ins either way. Seven London branches; the Branches tab has six named.
Gloria
££Big Mamma group's deliberately over-the-top trattoria, with a menu that changes every month.
Hawksmoor
££££British beef dry-aged and grilled over charcoal, in rooms that were mostly something else first - a brewery, a bank, a ballroom.
Hoxton Beach Falafel
£A market stall that has been frying falafel to order for years, and is on more London falafel lists than most sit-down restaurants.
Lagana
££Paper tablecloths, crayons on every table and flatbreads coming out of the oven non-stop, on the old Pachamama East site.
Legado
££££Nieves Barragán Mohacho's second restaurant after Sabor, cooking regional Spanish food rarely seen this side of the Pyrenees - and it took a Michelin star within two years.
Lina Stores
££The mint-green Brewer Street deli since 1944, now with restaurants attached.
Fresh pasta counter and deli; the restaurants came much later than the shop.
Llama Inn
£££The London branch of a Brooklyn restaurant that opened in 2015, reached through a yellow door on a back street and a service lift to the roof of The Hoxton.
Manteca
£££Chris Leach and David Carter's nose-to-tail Italian with hand-rolled pasta and a salumeria on site.
Whole-animal butchery feeding a menu of house-cured salumi and hand-rolled pasta.
Monohon Ramen
££A single-site ramen bar on Old Street that takes no reservations and has outlasted most of the chains that opened around it.
No reservations - walk in and wait.
Mukbap
££Entirely vegan Korean cooking - a category that barely exists in London - served with the warmth of a family kitchen.
Nightjar
£££Live jazz and blues every night in a basement off Old Street, with drinks built to match the era rather than the trend.
Live music nightly, with a music charge after a certain hour. Book.
Niu Hot Pot
££Chaoshan beef, which means the broth stays out of the way and the menu is sorted by cut - sirloin, short rib, rump, omasum, ox aorta, hand-made beef balls. Charcoal skewers and a private karaoke room alongside.
Eight soup bases including a congee base served with two live crabs. A halal section on the menu.
Old Spitalfields Market
££A Victorian covered market on the City fringe where the food traders sit alongside the stalls, so lunch and browsing are the same trip.
One Club Row
£££Hidden up a staircase above a busy Shoreditch pub - pork schnitzel with gorgonzola and mustard, and a rice pudding creme brulee to finish.
Origin Coffee Roasters
£Roasted in Cornwall and poured in a clean, modern Shoreditch room - a favourite of the people who take this most seriously.
Osteria Angelina
£££Itameshi - Italian cooking through a Japanese lens - with eight fresh pastas made in a glass-walled corner of the dining room.
Sister to Angelina in Dalston, but a different format: Dalston runs a set kaiseki tasting menu, Spitalfields is a la carte and faster. Executive chef Usman Haider oversees both.
Ozone Coffee Roasters
£A working roastery in the basement with a full kitchen above it - closer to an all-day restaurant than a coffee shop.
Padella
£A short menu of hand-rolled pasta at low prices, which is why the queue exists.
Original site opened in Borough Market 2016; now also Shoreditch and Soho, where limited bookings are taken.
Pilpel
£The City lunch falafel - fast, consistent and vegetarian by default across a handful of sites.
Plates
££££The first fully vegan restaurant in Britain to win a Michelin star, awarded in 2025. Kirk Haworth cooks a tasting menu that treats vegetables with fine-dining technique rather than as a substitution exercise.
Run by Kirk Haworth with his sister Keeley. One open kitchen, floor-to-ceiling windows, polished concrete. Tables are released in batches and go quickly - this is the hardest vegan booking in the country.
Popolo
££A narrow Rivington Street room doing Italian and North African small plates from an open counter.
Poppies Fish and Chips
££Trading since 1952 and done out as a fifties chip shop, with sites in Spitalfields, Camden, Soho and Notting Hill.
Rapsa
££Chef Francis Puyat comes from a coastal town in Occidental Mindoro and builds the menu around kinilaw, the Philippine technique of firming raw fish in vinegar or citrus instead of heat — here applied
Rochelle Canteen
££Hidden behind a wall in a former school bike shed, with no sign - you ring a buzzer marked 'canteen'.
Sagardi
£££The third proper asador in London and the easiest to get into - txuleton from old free-range cows over a charcoal grill in the middle of the room.
Seed Library
£££Ryan Chetiyawardana again, in a stripped concrete basement doing short, low-alcohol drinks with none of the ceremony.
Sheba
££A long-standing Brick Lane room, picked out on a TOPJAW run through the street.
Shoreditch Fish and Chips
££A 1960s-styled chip shop near Brick Lane doing the traditional version straight, with sauces thrown in rather than charged for.
Singburi
££The Leytonstone cult restaurant reborn in a Shoreditch railway arch under the founders' son, and the Thai restaurant Londoners argue about most.
Smoking Goat
£££Thai drinking food and live-fire cooking in a room that behaves like a bar - the sibling to Kiln and just as loud.
Sohaila
£££Lebanese sharing plates against a hundred-plus natural wine list - and it is run by Fat Macy's, a social enterprise that helps Londoners move out of hostels into their own homes.
Som Saa
£££Where modern regional Thai cooking in London really starts - founders trained under David Thompson at Nahm, and half the chefs in this guide trace back here.
Sông Quê Café
£The Kingsland Road institution that made the street synonymous with phở - strip lighting, fast turnover, enormous menu.
Sud Italia
£Wood-fired pizza from a stall in Old Spitalfields Market - one of the few genuine market pizzas in central London.
Market trading hours only.
Tavern
£££The Restaurant St Barts team took over the old Nest site and brought part of their own kitchen brigade with them.
Tayēr + Elementary
££££Alex Kratena and Monica Berg split it in two - a standing bar at the front, a seated tasting room behind - and it reached fourth in the world.
The Knave of Clubs
££A Bethnal Green Road pub that reached 43rd in the UK gastropub rankings soon after opening.
The Macbeth
££Time Out's fourth-best Sunday lunch in London, and it calls the thing a rowdy Portuguese luncheon in a revamped Hoxton boozer.
The Mayor of Scaredy Cat Town
££Walk into The Breakfast Club café on Artillery Lane and through a door built to look like a SMEG fridge to a candlelit basement bar.
Unity Diner
££Traditional British cooking done entirely without animal products - the place the vegan community names when asked for British food rather than international.
Non-profit; surplus goes to animal welfare work. The only fully vegan British kitchen on this list.
Vegan Yes
££Chef Mauro's Florentine cooking and Dr Min's Korean heritage on one vegan menu since 2016 - toppognocchi puts rice cakes and gnocchi in gochujang passata.
Viet Grill
££The smarter end of Kingsland Road, from the Cây Tre group, with a wine list someone has actually thought about.
Vincenzo's
£Twenty-inch pies cut into slices you eat standing up - the closest thing London has to an actual New York slice shop, rather than a restaurant doing New York pizza.
Slices are grab-and-go from 5pm; whole 16-inch pizzas are takeaway. The original Vincenzo's is in Bushey, outside London - the Shoreditch site opened late 2025.
Zapote
£££Part of the east London Mexican wave that has moved the centre of gravity away from the west end entirely.