Saturday in Whitechapel
Britain’s most extraordinary food market, street by street. We ate our way through it so you don’t miss a single stop.
East London’s Whitechapel market is one of Britain’s great food adventures — a stretch of stalls selling everything from Bangladeshi mishti doi to grilled Somali suqaar. Go hungry. Go early. Go with cash.
There is a particular kind of Saturday morning that only Whitechapel can provide. The light is still low. The market is already fully alive. The smell of cardamom from a tea stall mingles with sizzling onions from the grill stand next door, and somewhere behind it all there’s bread baking in a clay oven that has been here, in one form or another, for generations. This is not a curated food hall. It is a living thing.
“Whitechapel doesn’t perform diversity. It simply is diverse — and that makes the food more honest, and more delicious, than anywhere that tries to replicate it.”— Omar Farouq, MLG
The Essential Stops
Open since 1972. The dry-meat lamb chops have achieved something close to legendary status in London. Go at opening to avoid the queues. The masala fish is also exceptional and criminally underordered.
Mishti doi, rasgulla, pistachio barfi and a particularly good jalebi. The kind of place that looks unchanged since the 1980s, because it essentially is. That is a compliment of the highest order.
Follow the aroma of spiced lamb to a small room with plastic chairs and some of the best food in East London. Suqaar with anjero flatbread is the order. The shaah tea — spiced, sweet, intensely warming — rounds it off perfectly.
Brick Lane has its tourist-facing restaurants and its locals’ restaurants. Aladin is firmly the latter. The lamb bhuna and tarka daal have been made the same way for thirty years. That is the whole recommendation.
End the tour with a box of Persian saffron rice cakes and rose water sweets. The packaging alone makes it feel like a gift. The contents justify every penny.
The best food tours leave room for the unexpected stall and the unexpected conversation with a stallholder who turns out to have the best samosas you’ve eaten in five years. Whitechapel rewards the wanderer. Take the general direction and a good appetite, and let the market do the rest.
