11 Lunchtime Salads That Will Bring You Joy

A canteen-like spot on Waterloo’s Lower Marsh Road, Balance does a great, healthy lunch in the area. The move is to get one of their hefty salad boxes. The counter is a spread of big bowls, filled with saucy tahini-covered cauliflower mountains and refreshing Greek salads. They change daily but there’s always enough variation to suit everybody, and if there’s something with cauliflower or chickpeas, it’s usually a good bet. Get a mango smoothie as well and take your whole lunch to go.

Bewliehill, off Upper Street, has something LA about it, with its comfortable pastel tones and fondness of green smoothies. The salad bowls change depending on the season, swapping kale and rocket for brown rice and feta, or a red cabbage base with celeriac and a sesame dressing, and you can add an egg or some chicken if you fancy. It isn’t reinventing the bowl but it is a freshly made, light salad with a good balance of flavours, that’s ready within five minutes—and London isn’t exactly swimming in these options.

The ultimate all-rounder, Babylon is a cafe and restaurant in Raynes Park that’s worth spending a morning, afternoon, or casual evening in. You’ll often find suburban mums catching up over oat milk lattes and a slice of carrot cake, and locals popping in for a speedy chickpea salad lunch on their way home from the post office. Sometimes they have salads on the counter for you to choose from, but otherwise the grilled chicken salad and the halloumi salad are excellent and can be ordered to go. If you’re eating in, our favourite place to sit is on one of the tables by the window for maximum people-watching.

At 12pm, anyone and everyone who works around Covent Garden heads to Bibi’s Kitchen, ready to queue up for a box that could double as a dumbbell, filled with excellent, homemade-tasting salads. The line moves fast as small and large boxes are generously filled with a mixture of things like roasted carrots and chickpea salad, bulgur wheat with vegetables, and homemade hummus. The optional coconut chicken is definitely worth the extra few pounds. There are a couple of seats but when it’s packed with people squeezing past at lunchtime, the move is to get your box to go.

This aesthetically pleasing cafe in Wimbledon Village is all pretty beige and marble, but Demitasse is more than just looks. It’s a firm favourite when it comes to lunch in Wimbledon because of the buddha salad bowl. The kind of salad that’s actually satisfying, it’s got roasted cauliflower, richly seasoned chickpeas, and a tahini dressing that brings it all together. It’s a walk-in spot that can get busy during the weekends, but it’s absolutely worth the wait for a table.

Our go-to order at Lena’s, a small, bright red cafe in Paddington, is a large chicken rice box, which is filled with minced lamb, rice, plenty of shredded chicken, sweet potatoes, roasted carrots, and grilled aubergine, plus a couple of the excellent cold salads. Which by the way are far more than a couple of tomatoes and some limp lettuce—they’ve got couscous, bean salads, a creamy potato number, and plenty more. It’s the kind of food you watch an overachiever meal-prep on FitTok. 

Middle Eastern-inspired deli Honey & Spice is from the same people behind Honey & Co so you know the food is going to be great. The cheerful spot on Warren Street has Scandi-style open cabinets—filled with jars of nuts and seeds—that spark joy. Their street-side terrace is where you want to be on a warm day, but really (thanks to the UK weather) it’s mainly a takeaway situation. The salad boxes, packed with peppery radish slaw, herby chickpeas, and moist kofta, are a great lunch option.

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 Clerkenwell and Temple Fortune—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.

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.

Atis is one of those low-key healthy restaurants we always pictured ourselves spending our lunches in once we finally grew up and started taking vitamin B12 supplements. This build-your-own salad spot in Shoreditch (with more locations around London) makes seriously tasty, satisfying lunches. But if you’re as indecisive as a Love Island contestant 10 seconds before a recoupling, they also have plenty of huge signature salads. We’re big fans of the buffalo caesar in the colder months, but you can’t beat the black bean and feta-packed Azteca on a sunny day.

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.