What's the food culture in London?

London's reputation for bad food died sometime around 1997 and nobody updated the joke. What replaced it is harder to pin down than a single national cuisine, because the city's best cooking comes from immigrant communities that put down roots in specific postcodes over decades. Whitechapel and Tooting for South Asian. Dalston and Green Lanes for Turkish. Brixton for Caribbean. Chinatown for Cantonese roast meats. The pattern holds: follow a community's settlement geography and you find the food. What you won't find easily is great traditional English cooking in central London. The pub chains near major stations serve reheated pies, and the tourist restaurants around Piccadilly charge £22 for fish and chips fried in oil that tastes like it hasn't been changed since Tuesday. The real pie-and-mash shops — Manze's on Tower Bridge Road, Goddards at Greenwich — sit in the south and east, serving liquor (a thin bright-green parsley sauce, not alcohol) over minced-beef pies to regulars who've been coming for years. Eating well here means knowing which postcode to head for, not which booking app to open.

Morning eating splits two ways. The full English — fried eggs, back bacon, sausage, baked beans, toast, black pudding if the place is serious — runs £8 to £12 at a proper greasy spoon. E. Pellicci on Bethnal Green Road has served theirs since 1900, the interior Art Deco and unchanged, the tea so strong and milky it leaves a ring on the cup. For something lighter, the Vietnamese bakeries on Kingsland Road in Hackney sell banh mi for around £5 — crusty baguette, pork pâté, pickled daikon, fresh coriander. Markets take over at midday. Borough Market under the railway arches at London Bridge pulls serious crowds on Saturdays, the air heavy with smoke from the raclette stall and grilled chorizo from Brindisa — the split-casing rolls served on sourdough with roasted peppers, about £7, eaten standing. Maltby Street Market, a short walk southeast under a different set of arches, runs smaller and calmer. The lamb-stuffed flatbreads from the Middle Eastern stalls carry the smell of cumin and charred dough from twenty metres out. That's your lunch for about £9.

The curry question trips up most visitors. Brick Lane in Shoreditch is the obvious answer — neon signs, touts outside every door, laminated menus. The food has coasted on name recognition for years. The touts are the tell. Tayyabs on Fieldgate Street in Whitechapel, a ten-minute walk east, serves Punjabi lamb chops charred on an open grill, the fat rendered crisp while the meat stays pink, for about £9. There's usually a queue down the pavement — no bookings. Tooting, forty minutes south on the Northern Line, is where London's Sri Lankan and South Indian cooking concentrates. Dosas at Apollo Banana Leaf arrive thin as paper, edges laced and crispy, with sambar and three chutneys. The kothu roti at Jaffna House gets chopped on the flat-top griddle, metal on metal, the sound carrying out to the street. For Cantonese, the roast-meat windows on Gerrard Street in Chinatown hang whole ducks and char siu behind glass. Point at what you want, get it on rice with steamed greens, £10-12. No booking needed.

Pub food matters here, but pick carefully. The gastropub wave that started at The Eagle on Farringdon Road in 1991 produced some good kitchens and a lot of mediocre imitators. The Anchor & Hope near Waterloo does a bone-marrow-and-parsley salad worth crossing the river for — mineral, buttery, scraped onto toast. For the Sunday roast, The Harwood Arms in Fulham serves roast venison with Yorkshire puddings the size of soup bowls and potatoes with crackling edges, about £22. Book by Thursday or don't bother. Late-night options run thinner than you'd expect for a city this size. Wong Kei in Chinatown stays open past midnight — communal tables, fast service, hot Cantonese congee for £8. Beigel Bake on Brick Lane sells salt-beef beigels 24 hours, the bread warm, the mustard sharp enough to make your eyes water. One thing that works in London's favour for visiting food travellers: most restaurants use OpenTable or Resy, fully in English. The phone-booking problem that plagues eating in Tokyo or Seoul doesn't apply here.