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

About Stratford

Stratford is a neighbourhood in transition, and the food scene reflects that honestly. The Westfield Stratford City complex provides a comprehensive if predictable set of restaurant options — every major group operator has a presence in what is Europe's largest urban shopping centre, and the sheer convenience of the location, sitting above one of London's best-connected transport interchanges, means these restaurants are full most of the time. The more interesting eating, however, is starting to appear in the streets around the station and in the creative cluster at Hackney Wick just across the canal.

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park has changed the context of eating and drinking in Stratford. The park itself has several food and drink outlets that operate to a reasonable standard in an outdoor setting unlike anything else in east London, and the cultural venues arriving as part of the East Bank project — particularly the outpost of Sadler's Wells and the V&A — will bring the kind of cultural footfall that usually generates a better food scene around it.

Lets Discover creators who cover Stratford know where the quality currently sits in a neighbourhood that is changing quickly enough that the best options of today may not be the best options in a year's time.

Westfield Stratford City and the Stratford Centre mall provide the densest concentration of restaurants in the neighbourhood, with Westfield in particular containing several hundred food and drink outlets covering almost every cuisine and format. The streets between the Westfield and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park entrance have a growing number of independent cafes and casual restaurants that serve the commuting and park-visiting population. The Olympic Park itself has food and drink kiosks and more substantial restaurants at Timber Lodge, Here East and the stadium end, all of which are in genuinely unusual settings within a landscaped park. Hackney Wick, a short walk or cycle over the canal, is the location of the neighbourhood's most interesting independent restaurants and studios-converted-into-bars, and the boundary between the two areas is becoming increasingly permeable.

History and culture in Stratford

Stratford's history is that of a working east London market town that became an industrial centre and then, uniquely among London's inner neighbourhoods, an Olympic host. The town developed around a medieval market granted to Stratford Langthorne Abbey and grew through the Industrial Revolution as one of London's principal manufacturing and processing areas — the soap works, chemical plants, locomotive works and food processing factories that occupied its land employed tens of thousands of workers at their peak. The Great Eastern Railway's main locomotive works at Stratford were among the largest in Britain for most of the 19th century. Post-war deindustrialisation left much of the area derelict, and it was this dereliction that made the area viable for the 2012 Olympic bid, which required a large footprint of previously developed land. The transformation of the Lower Lea Valley for the Olympics, delivered in under five years, was one of the largest infrastructure projects in British history and created the framework for the ongoing East Bank development that is establishing Stratford as a cultural destination as well as a transport hub.