Every Cheap Eats List Skips the Prices. Here They Are.

The cheapest plate of pasta at London’s most queued-for pasta bar is £9.50. You can check that, because Padella dates its menu to the day.

Almost nothing else in this category does. Every cheap eats list in London names the same dozen places and prints no prices at all, and when you go to the restaurants themselves to find out, a surprising number of them will not tell you either. One publishes no price for its headline dish anywhere on its website. One prints its numbers without a currency symbol. One left its old web address dead and publishes no prices on the new one.

So here is what four of the most recommended cheap places in London actually charge, taken from their own pages and rechecked on 28 September 2026, and what that adds up to once you have eaten a whole meal.

The one that dates its menu to the day

Padella publishes a full menu with the date on it. The one checked for this page was headed Monday 28th September, which is a level of precision almost nobody in London matches.

The cheapest pasta is £9.50, the tagliarini with dried chilli, garlic and pangrattato. That is the dish the queue is mostly for.

Everything else runs £12.50 to £16.50. Slow cooked tomato tagliarini £12.50, pici cacio e pepe £13.50, ravioli £13.50, fettuccine with nduja £14, agnolotti £15, fettuccine with Scottish girolles £15.50, crab tagliarini and the eight hour beef shin pappardelle both £16.50.

Parmesan is 50p extra, and the menu says so in a line under the pasta rather than hiding it. An espresso is £2. Olives are £4 and sourdough with olive oil £5.50.

Three sites: Borough Market, Shoreditch and Soho. The Borough Market one is the original and the one with the queue.

The one that publishes no price at all

Franco Manca’s national menu page carries no pizza prices. It lists every pizza by number, with calories, allergen flags and a description, and not one figure against any of them. The page says the menu is the same in the vast majority of pizzerias, with small variations in a few.

For the cheapest famous pizza in Britain, that is a strange thing not to publish.

The one firm number is the lunch deal: £12.50 for a pizza and a soft drink, Monday to Friday, noon until 4pm, at all pizzerias. It is limited to pizzas numbered 2, 4, 5 and 6. Adding a dessert or a bite takes it to £15 for two courses and a drink.

Students get 20 per cent off from Sunday to Thursday through StudentBeans. A £6 pizza voucher ran to 11 October 2026 and has expired. The children’s option is £7.75 for a pizza, a drink and an ice cream.

The add-on prices contradict each other on the same page. One line offers an upgrade to buffalo mozzarella for £3.95. Another, a few items down, offers buffalo mozzarella instead for £3.15. Both are on the menu page, eighty pence apart.

Worth noting too that the what’s on section was still advertising Liverpool Restaurant Week for 10 to 18 May 2025 when this was checked, sixteen months after it ended.

The one with no currency symbol

Bleecker publishes its full menu and not a single pound sign appears anywhere on it. The prices are bare numbers: 10.5, 14.95, 4.75. It is perfectly readable and it is also the only menu checked here that leaves you to supply the currency yourself.

Cheeseburger 10.50. Bacon cheeseburger 11.50. Blue burger 11.60. The vegetarian Symplicity burger 10.50. Doubles are 14.95 and 15.95.

Fries 4.75, house fries 5.00, angry fries 5.50, angry house fries 5.50. Note the last two. House fries cost 25p more than plain fries, but once you make either of them angry the difference disappears and both are 5.50, so the house upgrade is free if you take the chilli.

Shakes are 5.95, except strawberry at 7.00 and cherry at 6.50. Soda 3.00, water 2.50.

So the actual meal is £18.25. Cheeseburger, fries and a soda, at a place that announces on its own site that it has been named the best burger in the world in the 2026 World Best Burger Places list. That is the honest price of a cheap burger in London, and it is not the number that appears in any roundup.

Its own page also says it has nine locations across London while a news item on the same site describes Camden as its tenth. The list names nine.

The best burger in London covers the wider argument, which is that two different restaurants both claim the world title in writing.

The one whose old website has gone

Roti King’s old domain returns a hosting error. Asked for rotiking.co.uk again on 28 September 2026, the response was still a Wix notice reading that the domain is not connected to a site. The restaurant now publishes at rotiking.com, which lists four London branches and their hours, and not a single price.

The restaurant is trading, at Euston, Spitalfields, Waterloo and Battersea Power Station. But it is the single most recommended cheap eat in London on most lists, many of them still point at the dead address, and even the live site gives you the hours and no idea of the bill.

It is the clearest illustration of the problem with this whole category. A place gets recommended, the recommendation gets copied, and nobody goes back to see whether the source still exists.

What cheap actually costs now

Put the four together and a usable threshold appears.

Under £10 buys one plate and nothing else. Padella’s £9.50 pasta, or a Franco Manca pizza if your branch prices it there, which you cannot find out in advance.

£12.50 to £15 is where a meal with a drink actually starts. The Franco Manca lunch deal at £12.50 is the clearest published example, and £15 gets two courses and a drink.

£18 to £20 is a burger, a side and a soft drink at the places that win awards for it.

None of these figures includes service. Where a service charge is added it is typically 12.5 per cent, which turns that £18.25 into a little over £20.

What to know

Check the restaurant, not the list. Every price here came from the venue’s own page, and half of them were not where you would expect.

£9.50 is the floor for a proper plate at somewhere worth queueing for, and it buys pasta and nothing else.

The Franco Manca lunch deal is the best published value in this piece. £12.50 including a drink, but only Monday to Friday, only noon to 4pm, and only four of the pizzas.

Assume a burger meal is £18 before service. The headline burger price is a little over half the bill.

Parmesan, house fries and mozzarella are all charged separately, at 50p, 25p and around £3.15 respectively. Cheap eats are cheap until the extras.

If a guide recommends somewhere without a price, check which website is current first. One of the four most recommended names in London moved address and left the old one dead.

Everything here was taken from each restaurant’s own published menu and rechecked on 28 September 2026. Where a restaurant contradicts itself, both figures are given rather than one being quietly chosen. Menus change constantly and branch prices vary, so confirm before you travel.

Halal restaurants in London asks a different question of the same restaurants: not what they charge, but what they actually publish about the meat.

The other end of the same subject: the Michelin starred rooms, the smarter restaurants, and the Sunday roast, which sits somewhere in between on price.

Where to go next

The fried chicken list has the hours, including the residency that opens only Friday to Sunday.

The best restaurants in London is the other end of the same subject, and set menus are where the expensive rooms become briefly affordable at lunch.

The best pizza and the best burger cover two of the four above in detail, and the best sandwiches are the genuinely cheapest lunch in this city.

London’s food markets and Borough Market are where most of this eating actually happens, and the Borough Market restaurants cover the sit-down half of it.

By cuisine, two of the best value kitchens in London are on pages of their own: ramen, where a bowl at Bone Daddies starts at breakfast rather than dinner, and Malaysian, which is uniformly good and open for about four hours a night.

Free things to do in London covers the rest of a cheap day.

Questions we get asked

What are the best cheap eats in London?

The names that come up most often are Padella for pasta, Franco Manca for pizza, Bleecker for burgers and Roti King for roti canai. The useful question is what they charge: Padella’s cheapest pasta is £9.50, Franco Manca sells a lunch deal at £12.50 including a drink, and a Bleecker cheeseburger is £10.50 before fries. Roti King’s old website no longer resolves, and its new one, rotiking.com, publishes branch hours but no prices.

How much is a cheap meal in London?

About £12.50 to £15 for a main and a drink at the places that publish a deal, and closer to £18 to £20 for a burger, a side and a soft drink before service. A single plate of pasta at Padella is £9.50, which is roughly the floor for a proper dish at somewhere worth queueing for. Service is usually 12.5 per cent on top where it is added.

How much is a pizza at Franco Manca?

Franco Manca does not publish pizza prices on its national menu page. It lists every pizza by number with calories and allergen information and no figures, noting that a few pizzerias have small variations. The one firm published price is the lunch deal at £12.50 for a pizza and a soft drink, Monday to Friday from noon to 4pm, limited to pizzas 2, 4, 5 and 6.

How much is Padella pasta?

From £9.50 for the tagliarini with dried chilli, garlic and pangrattato, which is the cheapest thing on the pasta list. The rest run from £12.50 for slow cooked tomato tagliarini up to £16.50 for Dorset crab tagliarini or the eight hour beef shin pappardelle. Parmesan is 50p extra. Padella publishes a full menu dated to the day, at Borough Market, Shoreditch and Soho.

How much is a Bleecker burger?

A cheeseburger is 10.50 and a bacon cheeseburger 11.50, with doubles at 14.95 and 15.95. The vegetarian Symplicity burger is 10.50. Fries are 4.75 and a soda 3.00, so a burger, fries and a drink comes to £18.25 before any service charge. Bleecker publishes these figures with no currency symbol anywhere on the menu page.

Do cheap eats in London include service charge?

Usually not in the published price. Where a service charge is applied it is typically 12.5 per cent, which takes an £18.25 burger meal to a little over £20 and a £12.50 lunch deal to about £14. Counter service places often do not add it at all, which is part of why the genuinely cheap end of London eating is the end where you queue and carry your own tray.