What to eat in London
London is more than fish and chips: the Sunday roast, pie and mash, curry off Brick Lane, a late-night salt beef bagel, afternoon tea and cellar-warm ale.

[ ] Eat a Sunday roast
    Roast meat with potatoes cooked in duck or beef fat, a Yorkshire pudding, vegetables and gravy. The central British meal, served on Sundays only.
[ ] Try fish and chips
    Cod or haddock in beer batter with thick chips, malt vinegar and mushy peas. The batter should be blistered and crisp rather than sliding off in a wet sheet.
[ ] Eat a full English
    Eggs, bacon, sausages, baked beans, grilled tomato, mushrooms and toast, with black pudding in the proper version. Served all day in a caff rather than only in the morning.
[ ] Try pie and mash
    A minced beef pie, mashed potato and liquor, a green parsley sauce. East End working food, surviving in a couple of dozen old shops.
[ ] Eat a curry
    Indian and Bangladeshi food in London stopped being foreign long ago: from the classic curry house to regional places serving South Indian or Pakistani cooking. Tikka masala was invented in Britain.
[ ] Get a salt beef bagel
    Boiled beef brisket with mustard and a pickle in a dense bagel — East End Jewish food. The classic Brick Lane bakeries run twenty-four hours.
[ ] Try a Scotch egg
    A boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat and fried in breadcrumbs. In a good pub the yolk is still runny, which is the main sign it was made on site rather than bought in.
[ ] Eat oysters
    British oysters from Whitstable, Jersey and the Mersey, both flat and cupped, with a pronounced mineral edge. Old oyster bars serve them by the dozen with brown bread and butter.
[ ] Walk Borough Market
    A food market under railway arches selling cheese, game, oysters and hot food to take away. Go on a weekday; on Saturday it is impassable.
[ ] Try a Cornish pasty
    A pastry filled with beef, potato, swede and onion with a thick crimped edge. Miners held the crimp with dirty hands and threw it away, which is why it is so thick.
[ ] Eat sticky toffee pudding
    A date sponge drenched in hot toffee sauce and served with cream or custard. Dense, warm and entirely unapologetic pub dessert.
[ ] Take afternoon tea
    A three-tier stand: sandwiches at the bottom, scones with clotted cream and jam in the middle, cakes on top. You work upwards, and it replaces lunch rather than following it.
[ ] Try Eton mess
    Crushed meringue, whipped cream and strawberries mixed without any tidiness. A summer dessert that gains from being messy.
[ ] Drink a builder's tea
    Strongly brewed black tea with milk in a big mug — an everyday drink rather than a ceremony. The milk goes in after the tea, and the argument about the order continues.
[ ] Drink a real ale
    Cask-conditioned beer pulled by hand pump, served at cellar temperature without added gas. Soft, malty and nothing like a cold lager.
[ ] Try cider
    Apple cider from the West Country: dry, cloudy and not sweet at all, unlike the industrial kind. The proper farmhouse version is called scrumpy.

Checklist from Unload: https://unloads.me/c/food-london