5 set menus that won't break the bank
Proper dinners in the capital, all under £20 a head
London is, statistically speaking, hosting an inflation party that nobody asked to be invited to. £18 burgers. £8 pints. A pasta dish at a casual Italian that costs more than your weekly Sainsbury's shop.
And yet, there are still places where you can sit down somewhere genuinely nice, order three courses, and get change from a £30 note. Some of them are actually iconic. Here are five that we go to ourselves when we want to eat well without checking the bank balance afterwards.
01 · Brasserie Zédel
Soho
£14.95 for two courses. We checked twice.
We had to put Zédel on this list too, there's nothing else like it in central London. £14.95 buys you French onion soup and steak haché in a gilded Parisian basement under Piccadilly Circus. The maths makes no sense and we're not asking questions.
02 · BAO
Various London
BAO15 set: a bao, a snack, a rice bowl. £15.
BAO's weekday lunch deal (Mon to Fri 12 to 5pm) gives you a classic or daikon bao, a small sharing plate, and a Mapo aubergine or Lu Rou Fan rice bowl for fifteen quid. It's the Taiwanese cooking that put them on the map, at the price of a meal-deal sandwich and a flat white.
03 · Manzi's
Soho
£16 for two courses of art-deco-era seafood.
The Wolseley group's gorgeous Soho seafood relaunch runs a lunch menu (Tue to Sat) at £16 for two courses or £20 for three. Fish and chips burger, pea and shallot raviolini, hokey pokey coupe, all in a room that looks like it was lit for a film shoot.
04 · Mele e Pere
Soho
£18.50 for two courses of proper Italian.
A basement Soho trattoria with a vermouth bar at the front and serious house-made pasta at the back. Two courses for £18.50, three for £22.50, available 12 to 6pm Sun to Fri. It's the kind of place that quietly raises a generation of Soho regulars.
05 · Richoux
Oxford Circus
£19.95 for two courses of revived Regent Street brasserie classics.
Richoux has been going since 1909, but the set menu is firmly in 2026 territory: gnocchi à la tomate, steak frites, baby chicken with bone-out chicken jus. Two courses £19.95, dessert plus £4.95. Available Tue to Fri lunch and dinner, plus Saturdays from 4pm.
Eat well. Spend less. Repeat.