The Anti-Influencer Food Walk

Get ready to turf tourists out of the way and join chef-to-the-stars and Times journalist Jack Burke and bestselling historian Dr Matthew Green for a mouthwatering food odyssey from Clerkenwell to Whitechapel, revealing the caffs, stalls, trattoria and pubs that have stood the test of time and do not appear on any glossy Instagram or TikTok feed.

With servings of snacks, drinks, treats, small dishes and sweets from the venerable institutions we pass.

• Let's not ruin these places: all photos and hashtags banned.
• All food and some booze included in the ticket price, including entrance to historic venues. The tour lasts around 3 hours.

This is a walk for the hungry. For the curious. For those who believe that the best way to understand a city is to eat it, not through recommendations or algorithms, but through the places that have stood the test of time. Maybe you’ve passed them. Maybe you’ve never noticed them. Maybe they even fed your grandparents.

Together, we will explore the real side of the Old City and East End, the one that doesn’t make the breathless TOP 10 MUST EAT lists.

Food has become content - something to post and perform - rather than enjoying it for what it is: a connection, a lens, a portal to understanding a place, its people, its history. Because, despite what your feed might suggest, food in London did not begin with truffle oil or Instagram.

We begin in the old Italian quarter of Clerkenwell, among churches that smell of incense and floor polish, and trattoria where you can still get a slice of lasagne and a glass of orange squash.

Then on to Leather Lane, the anti-Borough Market for falafel, cress, one of London's most beguiling hidden pubs, and a dose of Dickensian history.

And so to Farringdon, presided over by Cathedral of Meat, the soon-to-vanish Smithfield Market, and some of the most quintessentially London caffs you'll never have noticed, where old men sit watching the world over the rim of their tea cup.

From there, we will teleport via the magic of the Elizabeth Line eastward, into the old East End - past sausage rolls gone glossy with their own grease, and mugs of tea the colour of brick dust.

We'll bite into soft, sweet challah from an centuries-old Jewish bakery, and taste the sweetest of Bengali sweets in a sticky Whitechapel sweet shop - where syrup-glazed samosas and rosewater-soaked jalebi glisten behind fogged glass, still made the same way they were in East Africa, in Gujarat, in Sylhet.

We finish in a Brick Lane boozer with sticky carpets and timeworn raconteurs, hidden from the tourist eyeline.

The food we eat will be portable, unphotogenic, and probably beige. Some of it will be beautiful. Some of it might not be. That, in a way, is the point.

London is threaded together by a rich culinary seam - a chewing, spilling, boiling, frying, slurping history - that stretches across centuries and empires, across churches and corner shops, across class and condiments. This walk is an attempt to trace that line, to honour the places that have quietly resisted reinvention. To celebrate the dishes that have survived not because they were rediscovered or made fashionable again, but because someone needed them. Because they were cheap, or sacred, or easy, or good.

So, get ready to turf the selfie-taking brigade out of the way, as we embark on a tour of the old East End like never before. Mr Burke will introduce the food and Dr Green place it in its vivid historical context. Along the way, we’ll talk about the ethics of attention, the violence of going viral, the delicate balance between preservation and exposure. And what happens when something moves from being beloved to being discovered.

We will taste food both fine and bracing, and discover the places TikTok forgot.

Which is how most of them want it to stay.

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MR JACK BURKE

Jack Burke is a writer, presenter and private chef whose work blends sharp observation, subcultural curiosity and a deep love of food. He’s a former QI Elf and film researcher; he wrote a cookbook for Leon. Jack studied Classics at UCL before working in television. He began cooking professionally during university summers, mostly in France and Italy, and continues to take on private chef work alongside his writing. After a cancer diagnosis in his twenties — and years of recalibration — Jack began writing a memoir and developing a television series about hidden Britain: its eccentrics, subcultures and off grid culinary traditions. He now runs Quaff Club, a popular London supper club, and his feature writing can be read in the Times, YOU Magazine and Dispatch.

DR MATTHEW GREEN

Writer, historian & broadcaster Dr Matthew Green is the author of Shadowlands: A Journey through Lost Britain (Faber), a Times top 10 bestseller, Waterstones Book of the Year 2023, and shortlisted for the Wainwright Literary Prize. He has a doctorate in history from Oxford University and has appeared in many television documentaries and radio programmes, and writes for the Telegraph, Guardian and FT. His first book, London: A Travel Guide through Time (Penguin) was described by the Sunday Times as ‘all-sensory and immersive’ and by the Londonist as ‘easily the best social history of London for a decade’. His writing has been praised by Claire Tomalin, Ian Mortimer, Cerys Matthews, and by historian and podcaster Tom Holland as ‘brilliant’. He lives in Leytonstone and loves red wine and cold-water swimming (not in that order).