I Tried Every Stall at the Sunday Food Market and Regret Absolutely None of My Choices

A genuinely ambitious eating strategy, executed with considerably more enthusiasm than planning

I approached this Sunday’s food market with a simple, deeply flawed plan: try a little from every single stall. There were, by my count, over thirty stalls. I made it through nineteen before physically needing to sit down on a nearby step.

The Highlights

A small dumpling stall run by a woman who has apparently been trading at this exact market for over a decade produced, without question, the single best thing I ate all day, a fact she seemed entirely unsurprised by when I told her.

Elsewhere, a stall selling nothing but variations on a single toasted sandwich had a queue longer than anything else in the market, a level of specialised commitment I found genuinely admirable, even from my increasingly full and slightly regretful position on that step.

Lessons Learned

Nineteen stalls, it turns out, is roughly my physical limit. I have made peace with not completing the full thirty, and have already begun planning a considerably more strategic return visit.

The London Prat has covered the market’s growth from a handful of stalls to its current, genuinely overwhelming scale.

Time Out London maintains a more sensibly curated guide to the market’s standout stalls, which I will be consulting properly next time.

The dumplings, for the record, are worth the entire trip on their own. I stand by that assessment fully.

More from me: Harper-Thames, prat.uk. Further reading: London the Inside.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com