Following on from our FindaLondonOffice guide to eating out in London, a guest poster approached us from Skiddle to do a piece of eating out in London.

London is internationally renowned for countless things – its landmarks, its pubs, its culture, its music, its excellent public transport system and its fashion. However, one thing that London is most certainly not renowned for is its food. In fact, the city is widely regarded around the globe as having some of the worst food in the world

Luckily for Londoners, the last few decades have seen somewhat of a renaissance in London’s food. This can be attributed to the influx of immigrants with their rich, authentic cuisines, a growing national consciousness about the value of organic produce and increasing public awareness of healthy eating habits. All these factors have resulted in the proliferation of eateries in all shapes and sizes, perfectly catering to any budget, time constraint and location.

In the market for a quick, healthy bite for a hurried work lunch? Your choices are plenty.

Depending on which area you’re in, your options can generally be divided into three. The first is your typical healthy fast food outlet, such as Pret-a-Manger or Café Nero. Within these mini food emporiums are sandwiches of all varieties, wraps, basic sushi bentos, crisps and salads. You`ll also find little sweet treats including fruit, brownies, muffins and yogurts, as well as most of the popular non-alcoholic drinks and fruit juices.

Also within this category are franchise coffee chains, such as Starbucks and Costa, who offer a good range of healthy quick meals and snacks, to add to your giant coffee if you`re so inclined.

An often overlooked option are the food halls of supermarket chains such as Sainsburys, Waitrose, John Lewis and Marks and Spencer’s. The advantage of grabbing your lunch from these types of outlets is the extensive variety. Not to mention that the buying of food is an impersonal transaction, which is ideal when you’re thinking about that overdue report waiting for you on your desk.

Next, we have the hole in the wall sandwich and bagel shop. In recent decades, most of these have graduated from being grimy greasy spoon-esque sausage roll houses to offering a decent range of fresh sandwiches, salads and wraps. No fuss, no muss and generally much more friendly service than the sullen pimple faced employees of places in franchise eateries.

Finally within the speed-eat category, we have the restaurant takeaway option. This may take a little more time and cost a little more, but if you’re looking for something hot, tasty and probably likely to slightly irritate your co-workers, zipping into a Thai or Indian restaurant to grab a curry to eat at your office may be your best bet.

If you have a little more time and money at your disposal, London is endlessly littered with cheapy restaurants with cuisines from all around the world. Chain restaurants such as Pizza Express are always a safe bet for a leisurely sit down lunch. Another option is the quintessentially English pub lunch, with just about every block in central London housing a pub that offers various traditional dishes to be washed down with a well deserved pint. At the pub down the road from your office, you can expect to find a good pie, hearty stew, steak and chips. Many pubs will do a passable curry also and a Sunday roast if you`re unlucky enough to be working on a Sunday.

London’s wealth of cheap eateries, ethnic restaurants and food outlets mean that wherever you`re standing in central London, you`re likely to be less than 50m from an eatery. However, it can be hard to find something that takes your fancy straight away and even more so when you’re pressed for time. Repositories such as events and London are an invaluable navigation tool and your ticket to getting what you want to eat, when you want it.

London Lunch

Finding time for lunch is certainly not as easy as it once was.

It’s not a result of the credit crunch either. In fact, the time taken for lunch has been reducing for years; a trend that has seen delivery services and high speed food outlets have been springing up for some time.

Gone is the lunch “hour” that is still written into employment contracts.  A large percentage of people just don’t take the full hour and this cultural change is in many ways surprising given the various European directives on working hours which you would expect to make matters go the other way.

The picture is not clear, but it may be the substantial disappearance of what happened in the old days, e.g., your boss or employer giving you a dirty look if you were a bit late in the morning, and the more generally accepted flexible working where people know what work they have to do and roughly how long they should spend doing it. Perhaps they have adjusted their work pattern to suit.

This is largely a matter of interpretation, but we are absolutely sure that rather well dressed people spending 3 hours for lunch in rather good restaurants have worked out this balance to perfection!

As we move through the central business districts in the course of our work, moving from one office building to another, we are a little baffled as to who the people are in suits or similar standing outside drinking pints of beer or whatever at say 3.30 in the afternoon.  Flexible working sounds like fun for some!

Keep on top of the best eateries in London with the FindaLondonOffice Guide to Eating Out.

A popular restaurant that was recommended to us  is Shampers in Kingly Street, London W1, just on the Soho side of Regent Street, Mayfair.

The restaurant offers an ever changing and wide ranging choice of food of a continental style, with many of these dishes being quite traditional.

The wine list is excellent and extensive, and the atmosphere is that of bustling activity on account of the seemingly endless amount of people who want to eat there.

This restaurant is great value. We are sure that the bill will not leave a sour taste in your mouth!

We would like to introduce our first blog mini-series. The FindaLondonOffice Guide to Eating Out.

We at FindaLondonOffice deal with so many different clients in so many different locations that amongst other things, we learn what they have learnt – where to eat.  New to the blog will be a place where we can pass this information on.

Our clients have worked out what is great value as opposed to low cost.  The supply of this information is plentiful but sporadic, hence updates will only appear when a new discovery is made and we feel it is worthy of mention.

Many in Britain have more recently discovered the wonders of Turkey, especially on account of the strength of the euro, as they have not adopted the currency.  The food experience in Turkey particularly good, with the result that eating out at a Turkish restaurant has become increasingly popular in the UK.

We were introduced by a client to a long established Turkish restaurant in Marylebone called Topkapi, based at 25 Marylebone High Street. They provide excellent Turkish cuisine in an authentic Turkish atmosphere.

As to cost, this place is great value, and their Koftas and spicy  chicken are, we think, as good as they get.  Try and see what you think.