The perfect cuppa
London is a city of choices, a town where options abound, where diversity is defined and the cutting-edge celebrated. But sometimes, you just want a good cheese sandwich. Here's our guide to finding the best of London's basic treats
The perfect cuppa
Cheese sandwich (doorstep, mature Cheddar, pickle)
We hear it’s hard to beat ‘the one served in the bar at St John, on chunky white bread and absolutely no mayo’. If even that’s a bit too fancy, also recommended are the straight-down-the-line sarnies served at the Wenlock Arms and Royal Oak pubs.
St John, 26 St John St, EC1 (020 7251 0848). Wenlock Arms, 26 Wenlock Rd, N1 (020 7608 3406). Royal Oak, 44 Tabard St, SE1 (020 7357 7173).
Cup of (builders’) tea
Italian Bar Bruno in Soho does a great mug of builders’ tea, but your best bet is to head to one of the 13 remaining green cabby shelters where the tea walks the tightrope between ‘strong’ and ‘stewed’ and can usually be accompanied by a decent bacon sarnie. You have to be brave to face the banter (and shouldn’t linger if a cabby wants your place), but the rewards are plentiful.
Bar Bruno, 101 Wardour St, WC1 (020 7734 3750).
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| A proper roast |
Roast dinner
We’ve had plenty of recommendations for the roast at the Owl and the Pussycat on Redchurch Street. ‘Non-gastropub… and they have billiards. It’s the only proper boozer left that’s not full of strippers or suits or wankers,’ we’re told. Mini-chain Fuzzy’s Grub also does a decent roast (outlets in St James’s, Fleet Street and Cornhill).
Owl and the Pussycat, 34 Redchurch St, E2 (020 7613 3628).
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| Non-organic sweets |
Bag of sweets
While knowingly authentic sweetshops such as Hope and Greenwood (20 North Cross Road, SE22) are successfully invoking a 1940s world of bulls’ eyes and 26 types of liquorice, they are by no means lacking in pretention. London’s genuine old-school sweetshops are increasingly hard to find, but it’s said that one of the reasons Arsenal fans regretted leaving Highbury was that it meant saying goodbye to the old sweetshop on Gillespie Road. It’s still there, nameless and numberless, soldiering on with plastic jars half-filled with sugar mice and pear drops, but is looking increasingly forlorn.
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| Old-school cake-making |
Cake
Craft bakers in north London since 1820, Dunn’s in Crouch End can at least claim to significantly pre-date the local population of middling soap actors, musicians and authors. This is the place to come for an unfussy sponge or, at a push, Battenburg.
Dunn’s, 6 The Broadway, N8 (020 8340 1614/www.dunns-bakery.co.uk).
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