These are the east London spots you won’t wanna miss
Shoreditch is the busiest part of east London and is the spiritual home of the pop-up, so naturally, it’s bursting with some of the best places to eat and drink. In fact, you can probably eat your way around the world without leaving the E1 postcode.
Aside from all the cooler-than-cool shops, Redchurch Street is a food lover’s dream. This street alone boasts Smoking Goat, Brat and BAO Noodle Shop, which are some of the best restaurants in London, not just the neighbourhood.
Shoreditch has undergone a massive transformation over the years, blending the old with the new. From Michelin-starred spots like Lyle’s, The Clove Club, and Cycene, to beloved local gems like Beigel Bake, Shoreditch boasts a mix of innovative new restaurants and timeless institutions. Whether you’re in the mood for a refined tasting menu or classic comfort food, Shoreditch delivers.
It’s also become a must-have location for many of London’s mini-chains – there’s a Tonkotsu, Blacklock, Pizza Pilgrims and Dishoom in Shoreditch and they’re always packed out, proving just how many people flock east for a good feed.
With so many options, it can be overwhelming to choose where to eat. That’s why we’ve narrowed down the best restaurants in Shoreditch to suit every occasion, whether you’re after a cheap eat that won’t break the bank, a special occasion meal to remember featuring some serious cooking, or just good, honest, comforting food that’ll leave you feeling happy (and most importantly, full).
Smokestak
After killing it on the street food circuit for years, David Carter’s first permanent Smokestak is a dark, moody BBQ dream, complete with an absolutely huge custom built smoker, responsible for slow smoking all that meat (plus your clothes by the end of the night too). There’s some great snacks on the menu such as a giant slab of pork scratching dusted with chilli powder and BBQ pigs tails which won’t be to everyone’s taste but you should definitely try. A thick cut pork rib with picked cucumber is another favourite and even the veg dishes hit the spot – check out the coal roasted potato and the smoked girolles and beef dripping brioche toast. The snug basement bar is a top spot for cocktails too, perfect to help all that meat go down at the end of the night.
35 Sclater St, London, E1 6LB
smokestack.co.uk
Llama Inn
Cult Brooklyn fave Llama Inn has landed at The Hoxton in Shoreditch, in a beautiful rooftop restaurant complete with outdoor terrace. It’s a lovely space, filled with plants, terracotta tiles, mid-century furniture, and booth seating opposite the long bar, with tables and an open-air terrace at the back. The contemporary Peruvian restaurant has the same ethos of the Williamsburg original with a menu shaped by chef Erik Ramirez’s Peruvian-American upbringing. Don’t miss the scallop and dragon fruit ceviche, the crispy squid with corn and yuca ceviche, the charred cabbage anticucho and the caramelised pork chop with a zingy cucumber salad and green sauce. On the Llama Inn London cocktail list, there are some familiar favourites from Llama Inn’s NYC site, including the ‘Chupetini (one shot martini)’, made with Japanese gin, dry vermouth, umami bomb & blue cheese olives, and the ‘Llama Del Rey’, made from pisco quebranta, dark rum, red wine, chicha morada, and pineapple. The food and drink offering is more than exciting enough on its own to draw you into Llama Inn but the rooftop location, and its views of the East London skyline, is the cherry on top.
1 Willow St, London EC2A 4BH
@llamainnldn
Smoking Goat
Smoking Goat in Shoreditch branch is the place to come for smokey, BBQ Thai food. We love their freshly made rotis, goat krapow, turmeric crab curry, and the Thai-style fried chicken. It’s all a world away from cheap pad thai and prawn crackers and has been part of a wave of restaurants that woke London up to proper Thai food.
64 Shoreditch High St, London E1 6JJ
smokinggoatbar.com
Bistro Freddie
We were very sad to see Oklava shut up shop in Shoreditch but the space’s new resident, Bistro Freddie, from the Crispin team, is a worthy replacement. The space has been cosied up, with dark wood panelling around the open kitchen, white tablecloths and pillar candles on the tables. It’s romantic, it’s warm and it would be just as at home on a Parisian street as it does on its little east London corner. There’s a comforting, classical menu that nods to French bistro staples but with a definite British stamp on it. The house sausage with homemade brown sauce, the dressed crab, the snail flatbread, the bavette with peppercorn sauce and the fried plaice with curry sauce are all excellent – as are the chips – and if there’s a group of you, you have to get the pie. With a sharp, defined and unpretentious bistro menu; a great French wine list from Alexandra Price, who also oversees the wine selection at Crispin and Bar Crispin; and generous, old school hospitality, Bistro Freddie knows precisely what it is and what it’s trying to do, and it nails it.
74 Luke Street, London EC2A 4PY
bistrofreddie.com
Brat
It’s all about wood fire cooking at Tomos Parry’s Michelin-starred Brat. Named after the slang word for turbot, the restaurant serves whole pieces of fish and meat with other dishes, like young leeks with cheese, oysters roasted with seaweed and chilled tomato soup, representing a mix of Welsh (where he’s from) and Basque (where he’s travelled) influences. The dishes are simple, often just one or two ingredients per plate, but that just highlights how good the chefs are over that grill – the signature turbot really is something special. With the kitchen and grill, bar and tables all in one wood-panelled room (Brat is on the floor above Smoking Goat) the atmosphere is always great too.
4 Redchurch St, London E1 6JL
bratrestaurant.co.uk
Rochelle Canteen
Rochelle Canteen, run by Margot Henderson and Melanie Arnold, has long been one of London’s favourite spots. Housed in a former school bike shed on Arnold Circus in Shoreditch, accessible only through an unmarked door that, when buzzed in, leads you through a pretty garden and to a small dining room, it’s always been a hidden spot for Londoners to enjoy. Aside from being an excellent setting to enjoy a leisurely weekend lunch, the cooking is really quite good too. Simplicity is the order of the day and although menus change daily we can highly recommend the Queenie scallops, grilled in garlic and butter; the skate wing with burnt butter and samphire; and our favourite, the incredible braised lamb with peas and mint.
Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, London, E2 7ES
arnoldandhenderson.com
Lyle’s
Lyle’s has built up a stellar reputation thanks to its elegant, seasonal British food but if you don’t want to plan ahead, you can also drop in for small plates and a glass of wine from their bar snack menu (as long as one of the six bar stools are free of course). It is a changing menu, but if the mussel, garlic and spenwood flatbread or the smoked eel with cabbage and seaweed are on, they’re must-orders. It’s not exactly cheap, but as a Michelin-starred pit-stop it’s pretty perfect.
Tea Building, 56 Shoreditch High St, London, E1 6JJ
lyleslondon.com
Bun House Disco
Z He and Alex Peffly have brought Bun House out of Chinatown and onto Brick Lane, turning a corner site close to Beigel Bake and HOKO into Bun House Disco. The duo have defo got the disco part down – as well as an actual disco ball in one corner, there’s lots of red neon lighting and Canto synthpop on the stereo. Steamed buns may be what Bun House is best known for but here, it’s all the other bits on the menu that you wanna focus on. Go for the juicy prawn wontons in the hot and sour dressing as well as a selection of Cantonese small plates, like the kung pao wings, the mala tater tots (which are extra moreish when topped with satay beef chilli) and the beef tongue crispy bun, essentially a Cantonese slider. The stir-fried cheung fun – rolled noodles with peppers, beansprouts, and an optional addition of chopped lamb – reads as one of the more understated dishes on the menu but all of the parts, particularly the chewy noodles, combine to make it a real scene stealer. There’s a short list of classic cocktails with a Chinese twist, including a chrysanthemum martini, sesame old fashioned and a very punchy pandan negroni, on offer alongside a couple of wines and various hot and cold teas. Bun House Disco has also collaborated with Hackney Brewery, a Drunken Kwun Yum IPA and a Big Head Buddha Lager, both of which have very fun can designs and pair well with the food.
118 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 7EE
@8unhouse
Manteca
Manteca in Shoreditch is the third iteration of a restaurant that started at 10 Heddon Street before moving to Soho, and now finally settling here in on Curtain Road. Of all these, the new place is the one that really feels like their home. If you’ve been to Manteca before and loved it then you will definitely be a fan of the Shoreditch restaurant. All the elements are there – the in-house charcuterie, the nose-to-tail menu, and the fresh pasta – and now it’s all wrapped up in a beautiful new space and a bold menu that combines some of their classic dishes with several new ones. Don’t miss the incredible mortadella, made fresh in house; the crisp, rich pig head fritti; the clam flatbread; the n’duja mussels; and the tonnarelli with a brown crab cacio e pepe sauce.
49-51 Curtain Rd, London EC2A 3PT
mantecarestaurant.co.uk
Blacklock Shoreditch
It’s all about the meat here, with a range of steaks, big chops, skinny chops, burgers at lunchtime and specials up on the chalkboard. For us, the best way to go is still the All In, which gets you three varieties of pre-chop bites and you get a pile of perfectly cooked beef, lamb and pork chops sat on top of thick fingers of flatbread, so all those meaty juices run down and soak in, plus sauces and sides. And not forgetting a big spoonful of white chocolate cheesecake scooped right from the bowl.
30 Rivington St, London EC2A 3DZ
theblacklock.com
BAO Noodle Shop
Bao Noodle Shop is part of the Taiwanese mini-chain’s empire that includes three ‘regular’ Bao restaurants and Cafe Bao in King’s Cross. As you might guess from the name, it’s noodles that are the focus here rather than the steamed buns that made them famous, specifically the beef noodle shops of Taiwan. Despite this, there’s only actually two beef noodle soups on the menu, a rich Taipei-style with beef cheek, short rib and spiced beef butter, and a lighter Tainan-style beef soup with rare beef rump. And then to the trusty bao, here as good as ever, and with a particular shoutout to the prawn croquette bun which may just be our new favourite.
1 Redchurch St, London E1 6JJ
baolondon.com
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