Ploughmans Lunch appears as a signature dish in 1 United Kingdom cities. See each city's local variant and where to eat it.
Ploughman's lunch · London
Pub plate of three cheeses (a hard, a blue, a soft), crusty bread, butter, Branston pickle, pickled onions, pork pie, an apple. Eaten cold with cask ale.
While bread-cheese-pickle lunches have been farmworker's fare for centuries, the formal ploughman's lunch as a named pub dish was a 1950s invention of the English Country Cheese Council, who promoted it to drive cheese sales after the end of WWII rationing in 1954. By the 1960s every pub in the country had it on the menu, and London's Victorian pubs adopted it as the signature cold lunch option. The modern London ploughman's leans heavily into artisan British cheeses (Stichelton, Cornish Yarg, Stilton, Westcombe Cheddar) and small-producer pickles; pubs like The French House and Andrew Edmunds keep the format alive.
Where to eat in London:
- The French House
- Andrew Edmunds
- The Eagle
- The Jugged Hare
- Rochelle Canteen
- Quality Chop House