LDNGuide
The 14 Best Salads In London That Will Bring You Joy
photo credit: Giulia Verdinelli
Like taxes and forever clicking ‘update tomorrow’, salads often feel like a sad and inevitable part of adulthood you impose upon yourself after four days of pizza and countless pints. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Open your heart, open your mind, and most importantly, open your stomach to a world where salads can actually be delicious and filling.
THE SPOTS
photo credit: Giulia Verdinelli
The line between what is and isn’t a salad is as blurred and cloudy as a dressing that’s just had a dollop of dijon thrown into it. Balady—the legendary Israeli falafel spot with locations in Barnet, Clerkenwell, and Camden—makes some of the most delicious boxes around. They’re filled with Israeli salad, shredded carrots, thinly sliced red and white cabbage, pickles, dollops of hummus, and squeezes of zhoug. What you choose to get in said box—steaming hot herby falafels, roasted cauliflower, sweetcorn schnitzel—is up to you.
photo credit: Giulia Verdinelli
Caesar is the hardest-working salad in the business—converting lettuce-haters everywhere with its cheesy, garlicky goodness. The one at chilled-out cafe Snackbar in Dalston has leaves that are left whole—no aggressive ‘shrettuce’ here—and is topped with jammy eggs, moist, bite-sized chicken, crispy shards of chicken skin, and a generous dusting of parmesan. The dressing has the right amount of garlic and fishiness, without you feeling like you need to pop a mint. For an even more joyful experience, take it out back to the charming, hidden garden.
photo credit: Daisy Meager
Quick service and satisfying food make Xi’an Biang Biang Noodles our go-to for a pre-theatre meal in Covent Garden. And after our last trip to the casual Xi’anese spot, we spent the whole interval furtively Googling how to make their refreshing tofu skin salad. The tangle of thin tofu skin ribbons come lightly dressed with soy sauce and topped with dried chilli and greens. Light, satisfying, an utter delight.
photo credit: Lahpet
If you ever feel like you’ve been solely existing on a beige diet, enter the lahpet thohk from Burmese restaurant Lahpet, in Shoreditch. The salad is an irresistible mix of crunchy cabbage, crispy fried beans, tangy pickled tea leaves, sweet tomato, and super savoury dried shrimp. Throw in a heavy whack of garlic and chilli, and any cobwebs will be well and truly blown away.
photo credit: Aleksandra Boruch
The paired-back menu at Apricity rarely hints at the showstopper nature of what you’re about to eat. Case in point, a red butterhead lettuce salad. It has the consistency and moreish temptation of a cake, subtly sweet from burnt-off cobnuts, with zesty slivers of rhubarb, polite dollops of miso aioli, and fried crispy kale that does an excellent impersonation of seaweed. It’s a certified freak of the salad world. While the ingredients of this salad at the globe-trotting, fine dining Mayfair spot may change with the seasons, it’s sure to still be a vegetable revelation.
photo credit: Aleksandra Boruch
Forget everything you thought you knew about salads. Because this excellent Thai spot in Hammersmith couldn't care less. Get the pla plaa style lao—this hot and sour dish is 101 Thai’s very own creation. A round of applause for the team for putting crispy fried red sea bream, dried chillies, chilli paste, lemongrass, lime leaves, and toasted ground rice on a plate and declaring it a ‘salad’. Legendary behaviour.
photo credit: Atis
Atis is one of those low-key healthy restaurants we always pictured ourselves spending our lunches in once we finally grew up and traded cigarettes for vitamin B12. We’re hoping that time will come any day now, but either way this build-your-own salad spot in Shoreditch makes seriously tasty, satisfying lunches. But if you’re as indecisive as a Love Island contestant 10 seconds before a recoupling, don’t panic because they also have plenty of huge signature salads. We’re big fans of the Miso Disco warm bowl in the colder months, but you can’t beat the black bean and feta-packed Azteca on a sunny day.
Get yourself to Meraki’s terrace on Great Titchfield Street, close your eyes, take a bite of their Mykonian salad, and boom. Suddenly you’re sitting in a bay overlooking the Aegean Sea contemplating whether you should have another glass of wine. Please note: you absolutely should. The salads at this feel-good Greek restaurant are all about simple perfection in the form of high-quality ingredients, layers of olives, and the juiciest Santorini cherry tomatoes. There’s even a crispy filo spinach pie salad if you’re feeling particularly ravenous.
Chef Yotam Ottolenghi is widely regarded as the London King of Vegetables and when it comes to the salads at his Soho restaurant Nopi, we very much consider ourselves to be royalists. You’ll be greeted by huge platters of fresh salad as you walk into the sophisticated dining room, with everything from roasted aubergine to dates to fried garlic included in their vegetable dishes. If the crushed carrot and coconut number is on then consider it mandatory. God save our salad king.
We see your naff mouldy supermarket caesar and raise you a minced chicken larb that is packed full of roasted rice, chilli, mint, and what we can only presume to be the tears of the world’s happiest lime. This classic north-eastern Thai salad is super refreshing and a great option if you’re not willing to trade flavour for eating your five-a-day. Kaosarn is a small and simple but entirely satisfying Thai cafe in Brixton, and this place is also totally affordable with all of their salads around a tenner.
The first thing you should know about Jolene is that everything is just very, very nice. We’re talking wholesome scenes of toddlers tucking into marmalade shortbread, a big comfortable space you can spend hours in, and lots of happy contented faces from morning to evening. The second thing you should know is that their blackboard menu changes regularly, but there’s always some kind of salad on. And yes, you should always order it. We’ve had a great guinea fowl salad at the European-leaning spot before and, importantly, everything tends to come showered in parmesan and perfectly soaked in top-quality olive oil.
photo credit: Aleksandra Boruch
Chisou’s baby spinach salad is basically an optical illusion. It might look like a decorative plate of leaves for the world’s boujiest rabbit but look closer, do you see it? In the middle of the baby spinach is a majestic little pile of spicy prawns and yuzu dressing that, once mixed in, creates one of our all-time favourite salads in London. If this charming Japanese restaurant’s signature horenso salad doesn’t sound like your cup of delicious yuzu spinach metaphorical tea, then know that the Knightsbridge spot also does a fried crunchy squid salad and a simple avocado sashimi situation too.
photo credit: Daylesford Organic
You don’t have to be Chris Packham to get why eating seasonal salads that have come directly from a farm in Gloucestershire is a good idea. Fresh organic salads are exactly what you’ll find at Daylesford, an all-day cafe and farm shop in Chelsea, with all of their produce coming directly from the farm of the same name. Although their classic chopped salads are fine, it’s the seasonal ones that will really put a smile on your face. For obvious reasons, the options change regularly but you can expect everything from spicy toasted cashew slaws to juicy heritage apple and kale bowls.
photo credit: Chick 'N' Sours
Long before Harry Styles was repping the watermelon’s sexual street cred, the good people of Chick ‘n’ Sours were serving this great pickled watermelon salad. It’s tangy, it’s spicy, and it’s probably the worst nightmare of anyone who considers themself to be a coriander hater. Luckily, we are not those people and this is a great option for anyone who fancies a summer salad alongside an upbeat atmosphere. Combine with the szechuan aubergine and bang bang cucumbers for peak vegetable joy in Haggerston.
