A Shoreditch local journalist reads about British dinner parties ending at Sky Sports and London’s fourteen pound sandwich, and adds up the price of a night out between Old Street and Brick Lane
The Sandwich And The Package
Two London Prat pieces arrived on my desk in the same week and turned into one question. The first was about London, the city that charges fourteen pounds for a sandwich and gets away with it. The second reported on British dinner parties and why husbands mainly go to check for Sky Sports, concluding that most men leave by twenty to eleven, having discussed football for six hours and contemporary art for three minutes.
Put them together and you have Shoreditch on a Saturday: an expensive lunch, a dinner that costs more than you planned, and a group of people somewhere looking for a pub that is showing the match. So I decided to look at what a day out in Shoreditch costs now, and why.
Lunch
Shoreditch has always had two food economies running side by side. One is the economy of the fashionable: sourdough, small plates, natural wine, a queue outside. The other is the economy of the long-established: bagels on Brick Lane, Turkish grills, Vietnamese canteens on Kingsland Road, curry houses, cafes that have served builders breakfasts for decades. The first sells the fourteen pound sandwich. The second sells a filling lunch for a fraction of the price. Both are under pressure.
The reasons are familiar to anyone who reads business pages. Food and energy costs rose sharply in recent years. Wages have risen, as they should. Business rates and rents in central East London are high. Many hospitality businesses say their margins are thinner than ever. The fourteen pound sandwich is partly vanity and partly arithmetic. Somebody has to pay for the rent on Redchurch Street, and it is usually the customer.
Dinner
A dinner out in Shoreditch can now cost as much as a dinner party at home costs to host for six. That is one reason the dinner party, in the Prat’s account, survives at all: it is cheaper to cook for friends than to take them out. The research in the Prat piece is drily precise about the social theatre of dinner parties, but it misses one detail that any Shoreditch resident would add. In this neighbourhood, a lot of dinner parties happen because nobody can afford to go out every weekend.
Restaurants have responded in various ways: set menus, smaller portions, sharing plates that look generous until the bill arrives, and, increasingly, discretionary service charges that are less discretionary than they sound. Diners have responded by going out less often, choosing cheaper places or eating earlier. The early dinner, finished by nine, has quietly become a Shoreditch habit.
Watching The Football
And then there is the match. The Prat’s husbands at the dinner party are hunting for the sports package, asking the teenage son whether the host has the full subscription. In Shoreditch, the equivalent is the hunt for a pub that is showing the game. That has become harder in recent years. Commercial subscriptions to show live football are expensive for pubs, and some publicans have said they show fewer matches, or none, because the cost outweighs the extra trade. The closure of Boxpark Shoreditch in 2024 removed one of the area’s best-known big screens. Football fans now cluster in a smaller number of pubs on match days, standing three deep with a pint they paid too much for, watching a game their own subscription at home would have shown them for free.
Who Is Being Priced Out
The real cost of the fourteen pound sandwich is not the sandwich. It is who stops coming. Students, young workers, families and long-standing residents on modest incomes are the first to drop out of an expensive neighbourhood’s social life. They do not stop eating. They eat at home, or somewhere cheaper, or further east. Over time, the people who give a place its energy can find themselves visiting it rather than living in it.
Hackney’s Future Shoreditch plan acknowledges some of this, with proposals for affordable workspace and limits on certain kinds of development. But planning policy has limited power over the price of a sandwich. The market sets that, and the market, in Shoreditch, has been strong for a long time.
A Practical Guide
For readers who want to enjoy Shoreditch without a fourteen pound lunch, the advice is simple and local. Eat where the menus are short and the prices are on the window. Go to Kingsland Road for pho, Brick Lane for bagels and Bethnal Green Road for grills. Drink in pubs rather than cocktail bars. Watch the football somewhere that still shows it, and arrive early. And if you are invited to a dinner party, go, even if you leave at twenty to eleven. It is still the best value night out in London. You can follow my reporting on Shoreditch food, drink and the cost of living on my author page.
Saturday Night, Shoreditch High Street
At around eleven on a Saturday, Shoreditch High Street is a picture of every economy at once: queues for clubs, delivery riders waiting outside restaurants, groups of friends sharing chips on the kerb because the chips are the only affordable thing on the street. The fourteen pound sandwich is asleep in a closed cafe. The chips, at three or four pounds, are doing a roaring trade. That, in the end, is how Shoreditch survives its own prices: by keeping just enough cheap things alive for everybody else.