Best Restaurants, Bars and Things to Do in Hackney, London

About Hackney

Hackney's food scene has the confidence of an area that does not need to prove anything to visitors. The neighbourhood has enough independent restaurants, wine bars, coffee roasters and market traders to sustain itself entirely on local custom, and many of its best places operate on exactly that basis. Broadway Market on a Saturday is one of the best food experiences in London; the restaurants in the railway arches around London Fields are as good as anything in the city; the neighbourhood cafes on Well Street and Morning Lane feed the same regulars every day with the same quiet consistency.

The diversity of what is available is one of Hackney's genuine strengths. The area has a large Turkish community whose restaurants and bakeries on Kingsland Road and the surrounding streets are among the best of their kind in London. Vietnamese cooking, Japanese, Korean, modern European and a strong natural wine culture sit alongside this, giving the neighbourhood a range that few parts of London can match without the associated prices.

Lets Discover creators who cover Hackney know the area across its different registers — from the right stall to visit at Broadway Market on a wet November morning to the restaurant two streets from London Fields that is one of the best meals you will have in east London.

Broadway Market and the streets surrounding London Fields form the neighbourhood's most concentrated food destination, with the Saturday market bringing together some of London's best independent food producers and the permanent cafes, restaurants and bars on and around the market street trading through the week. Mare Street, Hackney's main commercial artery, has a mix of independent restaurants, chain cafes and specialist food shops running north through the centre of the borough. Well Street, which connects Hackney to Victoria Park, has a strong cluster of neighbourhood restaurants and independent cafes that serve the residential streets around it. Stoke Newington Church Street to the north is one of the best streets in north-east London for a self-contained food and drink destination, with a high concentration of independent restaurants, wine bars and cafes compressed into a short stretch. Kingsland Road, running along Hackney's western edge, continues the Vietnamese restaurant tradition that begins in Shoreditch and extends northward.

History and culture in Hackney

Hackney's history is one of London's most layered, reflecting successive waves of immigration and urban change over five centuries. The area was a prosperous rural retreat for wealthy City merchants in the Tudor and Stuart periods, with a number of significant estates and manor houses occupying what is now inner urban land. The Victorian railways transformed Hackney into a working-class district of terraced housing, and the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought significant Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, establishing communities that shaped the neighbourhood's culture and commerce. Post-war immigration from the Caribbean, West Africa and later from Turkey, Vietnam and other parts of Asia gave Hackney the multicultural character that defines it today. The neighbourhood's gentrification from the 2000s onwards, accelerated by artists and creative-industry workers priced out of Shoreditch, brought a new residential population and the independent food and drink scene that serves them — creating the mix that makes Hackney's restaurant scene unlike any other area in London.