Six Counters, One Lunch Hour: Where Smithfield's Trade Actually Eats at Noon

Ask anyone who has worked a Smithfield shift where to eat at midday and you will not get a restaurant name. You will get a time, a door and an instruction. Be there before the jackets go back on the hooks. Sit at the end, not the middle. Don't order the soup unless you can see the pot.

The market's day starts somewhere around three in the morning and finishes, for most of the trade, not long after the last lorry has cleared the loading bays. Lunch is a short, functional, genuinely enjoyed thing — eaten in work clothes, paid for in cash, over in twenty-five minutes. This is a crawl built from those conversations rather than from any list. Six stops, roughly in the order a market appetite demands them.

First: something hot, eaten standing up

Every shift has a hinge point — the moment when the pallets are done and the paperwork hasn't started. That gap belongs to a bacon roll. The caffs around Long Lane and Charterhouse Street fill with people who have been on their feet since dark: hi-vis over fleeces, gloves tucked into pockets, a phone going off every ninety seconds.

Order a bacon sandwich on white, a tea, and nothing else. Anything more elaborate will arrive after the person you came with has finished. A trader I spoke to reckons a good caff is judged on two things: whether the tea is poured from a pot that has been standing long enough to be worth drinking, and whether they'll let you sit for ten minutes without buying a second cup. Both are non-negotiable at that hour.

The pub that opens for the market, not the tourists

By half eleven, the Cowcross Street pubs have the lights on and the doors propped. The Hope does what a market pub should: serves quickly, keeps the menu short, and doesn't flinch when four people arrive in boots and want to be gone in half an hour.

What to order here is a pie and a pint, and you should eat it at the bar rather than at a table — partly because the bar staff are quicker, partly because the conversation is better and mostly because no one will ask you to move on. A butcher's buyer told me he rates a pub by how fast it can put a hot pie in front of him and how little it minds him reading a delivery note while he eats it. This one passes.

Broth, bread, and a hard chair

The stop that surprises people outside the trade is the soup. Offcuts, bones and trim leave the market in quantity every morning, and a good deal of it goes a few hundred yards into stock. Several of the kitchens around West Smithfield run a broth or a stew at lunch that is better than anything on the tourist side of the square, precisely because it is made from what was available rather than what was ordered.

Look for a chalked board and a short queue. Order the broth with bread and butter, take the hard chair, and accept that it will taste of beef and thyme and very little else. That is the point. A lorry driver finishing a flask and a plate at the same table is the best sign you will get that you chose correctly.

The sit-down hour, when a deal has gone well

There is a version of Thursday lunch that happens after a good sale and involves linen. It is not a daily habit for anyone on the floor — margins in meat don't run to that — but it is where the trade goes when a customer is being entertained or a deal has gone their way.

Order simply: something braised, something with a bone in it, a glass of red. The kitchens here have been cooking for this market for long enough to know that a person who has been up since three does not want a tasting menu or a foam. They want a plate that requires a knife and a napkin and nothing else. Book, and book early — the City's Friday lunch crowd will take the tables whether or not the market is still trading.

Pie and a pint, standing outside, twenty minutes flat

If you only have twenty minutes, the answer is the pub garden or the pavement. Grab something from a counter — a scotch egg, a sausage roll, a wedge of pork pie — and eat it outside. This is the most traditional lunch in EC1 and no one will look at you twice for doing it.

Order the pork pie at room temperature, not chilled. Ask for mustard. Eat it with your fingers, because a stallholder will and because there is nowhere to put a plate down. The test of a good pork pie, according to a counter hand who has sold them on the same spot for over a decade, is whether the jelly holds when you bite it and whether the pastry shatters or bends. Bending is a bad sign.

Coffee, then back out

Last stop is a flat white taken too quickly, and this is where the market and the City finally agree on something. There is decent coffee within a couple of minutes of the loading bays and there is very good coffee if you'll walk to St John Street. Pay the extra 40p. It is the only luxury in the working day that doesn't need justifying.

The practical notes

Come on a weekday, obviously — much of this closes at weekends and the atmosphere goes with it. Eat before one o'clock if you want to catch the trade rather than the office crowd, and before twelve if you want the best of it. Carry cash, because a surprising number of counters still prefer it. Don't book a table for six and expect to be out in an hour; don't book at all for the roll and the pie.

And if you only take one piece of advice from anyone in this market: ask what's good today, and then order that. The people behind these counters have been tasting their own stock since three in the morning. They make better restaurant critics than most of the ones with columns.