Eating in London on a Budget: How to Not Go Hungry Without Going Broke
The first time you check the price of a meal in London, there’s a moment. A brief, slightly hollow moment where you reconsider your entire trip. Even people from expensive cities get it. New York visitors get it. Tokyo visitors get it. Everyone gets it. London’s food prices are in a category of their own, and the sooner you make peace with that and find a strategy, the better the rest of the trip goes.
Here’s what actually works.
Supermarkets: Your Best Friend in This City
Eating out for every meal in London will destroy your budget within two days. The supermarket is not a compromise, it’s a survival strategy, and the good news is that British supermarkets are genuinely well stocked with decent ready-to-eat options. Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer, and Waitrose are all over the city centre. Pop in, grab breakfast and snacks, and save the eating-out budget for when it actually matters.
The staples are cheap enough. A loaf of bread, some basics for breakfast, a few bits for snacking through the day, all manageable. It’s the meal deal, though, that’s worth knowing about in detail.
The Meal Deal: What the Rest of the Country Already Knows
The meal deal is not a tourist thing. It’s a national institution. Every working person in Britain has, at some point, built their lunch around it, and for good reason. It works.
At Tesco, a standard meal deal costs £3.85 with a Clubcard, or £4.25 without one. That gets you a main (sandwich, wrap, pasta pot, sushi, salad), a snack (crisps, fruit, yogurt, chocolate bar), and a drink (water, juice, soft drink, or even a Costa coffee at some locations). Three items that bought separately would cost you north of £8, for under four quid with a Clubcard.
The Clubcard is free to get, takes thirty seconds to set up on your phone, and works immediately. There is no good reason not to have one. More than 80% of Tesco customers use a Clubcard already, which should tell you everything you need to know.
A typical meal deal lunch, for reference: a pasta pot, a yogurt, and a fruit juice. Filling, reasonable, and about £3.85. That’s lunch sorted in a city where a coffee alone costs £4.50.
Tesco also does a premium meal deal tier at £5.50 with Clubcard, which covers Tesco Finest and branded items if you want to upgrade. Still significantly cheaper than buying anything near a tourist sight.
Other supermarkets do their own versions. Sainsbury’s meal deal comes in at £3.75, and Asda’s is £3.74 with no loyalty card required. All solid options depending on what’s nearest.
Wetherspoons: The Budget Sit-Down Secret
At some point you’ll want to actually sit down somewhere, have a proper meal, and maybe a drink with it. This is where Wetherspoons earns its reputation.
Wetherspoons (Spoons, to everyone who’s been) is a nationwide pub chain with a straightforward proposition: proper pub food and cheap drinks in a large, no-frills room. It’s not fine dining. It’s not trying to be. But the prices make most other options look offensive by comparison.
The weekday deals are where the real value is. On Tuesdays, a beer and burger deal starts from £9.99, including one of their gourmet burgers served with chips, onion rings, and a choice of over 150 drinks. Monday brings a small plates deal, with any three dishes from a menu of 20 options for £10, again with drinks included. The Afternoon Deal runs Monday to Friday between 2pm and 5pm, covering pub classic meals at reduced prices with a drink bundled in.
A standard meal deal with a soft drink averages around £5.29, or £6.82 with an alcoholic drink. For London, that is remarkable. A pint in most London pubs is £6 to £7.50 on its own. At Spoons you’re getting food with it for less.
The food is exactly what you’d expect from a large chain pub. It won’t surprise you, it won’t disappoint you, and it won’t empty your wallet. If you’re eating with a group and everyone needs to find something they can afford, Spoons solves the problem without anyone having to have the awkward conversation.
Use the app to order from the table. It works well and saves the bar queue.
Eating Out Properly: What It’ll Actually Cost
When you do sit down somewhere that isn’t Spoons, budget accordingly. A main course at a mid-range London restaurant sits at around £16 to £20, and that’s before drinks, sides, or service charge, which is typically added automatically at 12.5% and is not optional in many places. Two courses and a drink for one person will usually clear £35 to £40 without much effort.
Takeaway and casual dining is cheaper but not by as much as you’d hope. A reasonable sit-down curry, a bowl of noodles, or a decent pizza will typically come in at £12 to £15. Better, but it adds up fast across a week.
Fast Food: Not the Escape You’re Hoping For
The instinct when prices bite is to head for the nearest McDonald’s and get back on solid ground. Understandable. The problem is that London’s fast food prices have followed everything else upward.
A medium Big Mac meal currently costs around £6.69 to £6.91, and a large one is approximately £7.39 to £7.62, depending on location. Central London branches typically charge at the higher end. For the price of a large Big Mac meal in central London you could be sitting in Wetherspoons with a burger, chips, onion rings, and a pint.
That’s not to say McDonald’s has nothing going for it. A cheeseburger is still £1.39, and a Happy Meal comes in at £3.89. The app regularly has deals that bring costs down meaningfully. Download it before you visit and check what’s running.
KFC, Burger King, and the rest are all in similar territory. Fast food in London is not the cheap fallback it is in most other countries. Factor that in before it catches you out.
The Budget Food Strategy That Actually Works
To pull it all together, here’s the approach that keeps costs under control without making every meal a miserable experience:
- Breakfast: Supermarket. Sorted for under £2.
- Lunch: Meal deal, every single day. £3.85 with a Tesco Clubcard.
- Dinner: One Wetherspoons meal deal during the week for under £7. One proper restaurant meal for a treat. One supermarket dinner when the budget needs a rest.
- Snacks and drinks: Supermarket only. A bottle of water from a tourist kiosk near the Thames is £2.50. The same bottle from Tesco is 50p.
Do that across a week and you’ll eat well, feel human, and still have money left for the things that actually cost it.
London’s food prices are what they are. Fighting them is exhausting and largely pointless. Work around them instead, and the city becomes a lot more manageable.