Great Foodie Destinations: London, Part 2

London’s appetite for reinvention does not let up. After our first look at the city’s food scene, today we’re taking a look at three more stories worth knowing: sandwich shops racing each other to build bigger, fast food borrowing tricks from tasting menus, an Irish stout has somehow ended up in a milkshake, plus the long-running argument over the capital’s best cheeseburger.

The Sandwich Arms Race

London’s sandwich shops have stopped competing on flavour alone and started competing on scale. Bristol import Sandwich Sandwich topped Time Out’s fan-voted ranking within days of its first City branch opening, and the follow-up act is bigger again: a second shop on Mark Lane, near Fenchurch Street, at roughly 325 square metres, said to be the largest sandwich shop in the UK. The menu sticks to what worked the first time round: sliced southern fried chicken with house coleslaw, coronation chicken with mango chutney and mint yoghurt, overnight roasted sirloin with horseradish mayo.

Shoreditch has answered with something stranger. My Favourite Sandwich, from the team behind Dirty Bones and Señor Ceviche, takes the classics and rebuilds them: The Eurotrash pairs fried mortadella with pickled onion Monster Munch and giardiniera, while the Primo Coronation Chicken adds champagne-pickled raisins to curried mayo.

Order this: the Bang Bang Banh Mi, built on chicken, pâté and Asian pickled slaw, alongside a bag of the house-made Spudos crisps.

Fine Dining Learns to Slum It

Chicken Shop founder Carl Clarke has spent years treating fried chicken as a serious craft, so it made a kind of sense when he brought in Gareth Ward, whose two-Michelin-starred Ynyshir sits in rural Wales, for a one-off collaboration. The result, a Singapore Chilli Crab Chicken Burger loaded with chilli crab oil and ketchup, kewpie mayo, dill pickles and Japanese seven chilli spice, translated one of Ward’s signature dishes into fast food without losing what made it worth eating in the first place. It is part of a wider pattern in London: chefs increasingly treat a takeaway counter as a legitimate stage, not a step down from the tasting menu.

The Burger, Reconsidered

Two stories converged on London’s burger scene this year, from opposite directions. At the indulgent end, Black Tap‘s Soho branch, seconds from The Devonshire, launched the world’s first officially Guinness-approved milkshake: half a pint of stout blended into a chocolate base, finished with a chocolate-lined glass, a white chocolate rim and a tower of whipped cream, with a slice of Guinness chocolate cake on top for anyone still hungry. It has divided opinion since launch, which seems to be the intention.

At the more considered end, the Financial Times recently sent its critics out to settle the question of London’s best cheeseburger, and found no shortage of contenders. Black Bear Burger‘s Classic was named the world’s second-best burger by World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants, one of six London entries on the 2025 list. The Beaumont’s Colony Grill Room takes the opposite approach, blending three cuts of dry-aged beef with two cheeses over twelve-hour caramelised onions. Between the two sits everything from smash patties to wagyu steakhouse builds.

Order this: the Classic at Black Bear if you want London’s most decorated burger, or the Colony Grill Room’s version if you’d rather eat it somewhere with white tablecloths.

London’s food scene keeps proving that reinvention doesn’t need to mean starting from scratch. Sometimes it just means a bigger shop, a stranger sandwich, or a Michelin chef willing to get his hands dirty behind a fryer.

Fancy building a food-led trip of your own, in London or further afield? We can arrange the reservations, accommodation, activities – and everything in between.