Food & book trails – London

18th February 2019

TripFiction’s Andrew was given his best Christmas present EVER in 2018…the mouth-watering Food Trails from Lonely Planet: ‘Plan 52 perfect weekends in the world’s tastiest destinations‘.

‘This book is a gastronomic tour of the world in 52 short breaks. We’ve scoured the globe for the greatest food experiences worth planning your travels around – not just fine dining, but also the best regional specialities, the most atmospheric street food spots, and the most memorable cooking courses’.

‘Whether we realise it or nor, food is one of the key ways in which we experience a place when travelling‘.

Here at TripFiction we have a passionate belief that literature and books are another way to really understand a destination….seeing a location through an author’s forensic eyes, walking the same streets as a book’s characters, eating the same local food as a protagonist and guzzling the same drinks.

So why not combine the two?

So let’s take a look at Lonely Planet’s Food Trail ‘Reviving Old London‘ and see which books set firmly in our great capital city could help in our appetising quest for English culinary & literary harmony.

This Food Trail recognises that London may now be a truly multicultural world city, but acknowledges that engrained in the big smoke there is still a class of traditional cares and bars that have one foot stuck firmly in the past.

• E Pellici – ‘give a Brit a choice of breakfasts and you won’t find many who choose orange juice and a croissant. The Full English – an epic fried breakfast of bacon, sausage, egg and a host of side orders – is a national institution, to the lament of cardiologists across the country. By a quirk of 20th-century immigration – oh, the irony – many of the greasy spoon cafes that serve this quintessentially English breakfast are Italians. E Pellici, within easy striking distance of hip Hoxton and Columbia Road Flower Market, has been run by the same Italian family since 1900’
• F Cooke – ‘behind an old-fashioned shopfront, F Cooke has been serving traditional pie-and-mash to generations of proper East Enders. This classic dish is an institution borne of necessity – the inhabitants of the slum tenements of the East End needed cheap, fast food to fill their bellies, and pies filled with minced-up beef, made from flavoursome off-cuts, fit the bill perfectly’
• St John – ‘for supper, head back to the City into Smithfield Market, London’s bustling wholesale meat market, where one of London’s most carnivorous restaurants has been reacquainting Londoners with the wriggly bits found alongside their favourite cuts of meat. Nose-to-tail eating is the motto at St John Smithfield and that means offal, in all its fascinating and flavoursome guises’
• Monmouth Coffee – ‘although London first caught the coffee bug all the way back in the 1700s, Monmouth Coffee was one of the pioneers of Britain’s 20th century coffee renaissance, and it has been roasting coffee from small producers for nearly 40 years. Their Borough Market location is the perfect place to start a morning of foodie browsing and sampling’
• Borough Market – ‘today this is the centre of the world for London’s “urban peasants” who love everything wholsome, rare breed and artisan. The market dates back to at least 1276 but it was only in the 1990s that it made the leap from bog-standard fruit and veg mart to gourmet phenomenon’
• Sipsmith – ‘when William Hogarth etched his famous GIN LANE in the 18th century, satirising the debauched life of London’s impoverished alcoholics, he could never have imagined that gin would be transformed from the comfort of the masses into the favourite quaff of London’s affluent. In 2009, Sipsmith Distillers was granted the first new distillers’ licence in 200 years. It now has its own dedicated premises in the upmarket western enclave of Chiswick, where gin buffs can see the process from start to finish on distiller-led tours. The house gins are a homage to old London in a glass, infused with hints of juniper, sloe berries, tea leaves and herbs’

After following all that food and drink history across London, what could be better than settling down with a book set in those same atmospheric streets. So grab a Monmouth Coffee or a Sipsmith gin & tonic, and dive into some books set equally firmly in this great city:

Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author

“I am going to write every single day and tell you about my life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London…”

Drawing comparisons with Pepys, Mayhew and Dickens, the gentle author of Spitalfields Life has gained an extraordinary following in recent years, by writing hundreds of lively pen portraits of the infinite variety of people who live and work in the East End of London.

Everything you seek in London can be found here – street life, street art, markets, diverse food, immigrant culture, ancient houses and history, pageants and parades, rituals and customs, traditional trades and old family businesses.

Spend a night in the bakery at St John, ride the rounds with the Spitalfields milkman, drop in to the Golden Heart for a pint, meet a fourth-generation paper bag seller, a mudlark who discovers treasure in the river Thames, a window cleaner who sees ghosts and a master bell-founder whose business started in 1570. Join the bunny girls for their annual reunion, visit the wax sellers of Wentworth Street and discover the site of Shakespeare’s first theatre.

All of human life is here in Spitalfields Life….

city-lit London edited by Heather Reyes

London is the world’s most happening, most exciting and most diverse city. From Roman stronghold and capital of the British Empire to financial powerhouse and city of the 2012 Olympics, London has always looked to the past and the future.

No one reflects this complexity better than London’s writers, whether home-grown, adopted or simply visiting. city-lit London offers us the best ever writing on this amazing city with over sixty dazzling writers. Join them as

Will Self gets inside the head of a London cabby
Jan Morris flies in to Heathrow
Monica Ali smells the curry on Brick Lane
Alan Bennett gives us a ride in the Queen’s carriage
Xiaolu Guo enjoys a greasy spoon café in Hackney
Helen Simpson takes us for a stroll on Hampstead Heath
Beryl Bainbridge attends Dr Johnson’s funeral in
Westminster Abbey
Virginia Woolf goes shopping in Oxford Street
Dostoyevsky strolls down the Haymarket …

A Girl Called Flotsam by John Tagholm

For fans of Sebastian Faulks, Joanne Harris and William Boyd. Beatrice Palmentier is 36, an award-winning director. And discontent. She is about to make a documentary on world-famous restaurateur Joseph Troumeg, when the discovery of a skull on the Thames’ riverbank throws her off course.

Wartime Paris and contemporary London feature in this page-turning novel which is both a captivating love story and a compelling mystery.

Amazing Disgrace by James Hamilton-Paterson

Set both in Tuscany and in the trendy haunts of London, this is the hilarious sequel to Cooking with Fernet Branca.

The inimitable Gerald Samper is back, with his musings on the absurdities of modern life and his entertaining asides during which he comments on everything from publishing to penile implants, celebrity sportswomen to Australian media moguls. Plus his marvelously eccentric recipes.

A smart literary romp featuring a cavalcade of misadventures and memorable characters.

Secret London – unusual bars and restaurants by Rachel Howard & Hannah Robinson

Have lunch with the inmates of a high security prison, stroll through a sex shop into a Mexican restaurant, sing your heart out in a clandestine Korean karaoke club, tap your toes in a gypsy swing club, get pickled in a marooned Irish pub, join the sixties club that’s still swinging, drink cappuccinos made by murderous bikers, play petanque in a central London cellar, tap an oak-tree trunk for whisky…

Discover over 140 places with eye-popping decor, eccentric owners, and unusual menus. This guide to London’s most peculiar and under-the-radar bars and restaurants is for serious foodies, intrepid drinkers, urban explorers and anyone curious to discover the infinite possibilities to have fun in London.

An absolute must-have to finally enjoy the amazing hidden London bar/restaurant/pub/club scene.

The above are just an amuse-bouche of five books with a vaguely foodie flavour to accompany you on your Food Trail through London. But we have almost 600 books across all genres on the TripFiction database set in London. And here is one of our earlier blog posts with ‘Ten great books set in London‘ from our ‘great books set in‘ series.

We hope this gets your appetite, travel and literary juices flowing, and if you use this article as your guide for any culinary or reading ideas on your next trip to London, we’d love to hear from you.

Which eateries or drinking dens would you add? Which books have we missed?

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