Dishes at Quo Vadis include broiled mackerel and radicchio with pork. Photos by Hazel Thompson for The New York Times

Mark Bittman goes looking for the English on London menus, and tells you where to eat in-between Games.

Mock English food all you like. But the local food thing is almost as inbred in England as it is in France; it just sometimes hides behind poverty, war or a fatal attraction to America.

Today there are literally dozens of restaurants featuring not only fish from the Channel, the North Atlantic and the North Sea, but local beef and pork. Meanwhile, there is lamb from Wales and Scotland, and produce from everywhere.

My focus here wasn't ingredients. It was a style of cooking that's called, for want of a better term, "English." When I saw eel or Jersey royals (a new potato with a cult following) on a menu, I figured I was headed in the right direction.

Here are my favorites, in order.

Canteen

Admittedly, this is a chain. The atmosphere is similar to what you find in a New York coffee shop, and though character isn't its strong suit, I find myself recommending Canteen to friends as well as stopping there myself whenever I'm in London.

Maybe if you're British the food seems ordinary, but to me it verges on the exotic: savory pies, meat or meatless; a salad of smoked haddock and poached egg; pig cheek with carrot and Swede (rutabaga); Welsh rabbit with egg.

In a city in which everything seems wildly pricey to many tourists, Canteen is reasonable.

Only one of the main courses approaches 20 pounds ($31.50); most are far less, and - get this - many if not most dishes are available in half portions for half-price. The last time I was there, two of us shared five dishes and a little wine and escaped for less than 50 pounds.

Canteen, Royal Festival Hall, Belvedere Road (and three other locations); (44-845) 686-1122; canteen.co.uk. An average meal for two, without drinks or tip, is about 40 pounds.

Hawksmoor Seven Dials

They were eating steak in London before the New York steakhouse was invented. Hawksmoor, like Canteen, has multiple locations (the one I tried is called Seven Dials after its Covent Garden location) and with a little menu-fiddling can also be reasonably priced.

Comparisons pretty much end there. Here there are elaborate wine and cocktail lists along with huge steaks posted specially on a chalkboard; look to the printed menu for those of a more normal size.

Either way, they should be shared. In fact, that's my recommendation for everything, because the side dishes and desserts are both terrific.

(You get a sense that there's a real chef in the kitchen, not just some guy who knows how to grill steaks.)

The beef, it should be said, is British. It is grass-fed, delicious and impeccably cooked over hardwood charcoal.

I was happy about a samphire-and-crab salad, and even more so with a salad of eel, ham hock, watercress, mint, peas, croutons and poached egg; the plain green salad is also very well done.

Chips fried in beef fat (among the best I've ever had), Jersey royals and a whole grilled fish were also near-perfect, though the chicken was dry.

On a second visit I managed a few tastes of dessert: Champagne jelly with citrus is a gorgeous palate-cleanser; sticky toffee pudding, rich and dense; and peanut butter shortbread with salty ice cream, kind of ideal.

The Hawksmoor Seven Dials is in a vaulted cellar, bricked and lovely but unchanging throughout the day, and with a pleasant but decidedly saloon like atmosphere. Service on our visit was better than average.

Hawksmoor Seven Dials, 11 Langley St. (and two other locations); (44-207) 420-9390; thehawksmoor.com/locations/seven-dials. An average meal for two, without drinks or tip, can run 100 pounds, but, with judicious ordering, can be far less.

Dinner

Waiting for me to get to the fancy-pants place? Here you go: It's called Dinner. (You may never tire of saying, "We're having dinner at Dinner," and I guess that's the idea.)

In the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Knightsbridge, it couldn't be in a more upscale location. Nor could it have a better pedigree: The chef is Heston Blumenthal, a molecular gastronomist best known for the Fat Duck (in the town of Bray, to the west), which, since El Bulli in Spain has closed, is the most famous avant-garde restaurant in the world.

Dinner is supposedly a group of dishes all dug up by Blumenthal and his staff from medieval and later sources, historical recipes. Supposedly.

This gives the entire meal a narrative theme that most lack, though most of the food appears to be neither more nor less than that of other contemporary cuisine.

Nevertheless, the food is almost uniformly delicious. From a ball of chicken liver mousse with orange jelly disguised to look like a mandarin orange, to the gorgeous rose tea service, the food is careful, precise and irresistible. It had better be, because there are no bargains here, and Blumenthal has a reputation to uphold.

The oat porridge, the salamagundi, the pigeon and artichoke, and other dishes were fabulous, creative and interesting, as was the brown-bread ice cream.

Dinner, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge; (44-207) 201 3833; dinnerbyheston.com. An average meal for two, without drinks or tip, runs about 110 pounds.

Albion Cafe

Shoreditch is an area of London that has been increasingly gentrified since the '90s. Albion is a market and a restaurant that is bright, cheery and appealing.

A huge open kitchen churns out loaves of brioche and white and brown bread as if they were for show, which presumably they aren't. It's also churning out good, inexpensive food in a pleasant atmosphere. Lamb kidneys on toast were perfectly browned, breathtakingly tender and flavorful, in a light and lightly spiced glaze, finished with parsley.

Chips came with what I thought was over-battered fried fish, but that's a style question; the execution was fine, and some will think it perfect.

I do not believe you need to go this far from the center of town to eat well, but if you're here anyway, you could do a lot worse.

Albion, 2-4 Boundary St., Shoreditch; (44-207) 729 1051; albioncaff.co.uk. An average meal for two, without drinks or tip, runs about 40 pounds.

Quo Vadis

Smack in the middle of Soho, Quo Vadis has survived largely on its location, but it's gone through a few iterations, and the current one is the best.

It's a cozy compilation of several small, attached buildings (Marx and Engels lived upstairs in one of them), with the bistrolike restaurant on the ground floor and private rooms and a club upstairs.

The menu changes pretty much daily, but it's always appealing. A prix fixe of 17.50 pounds for two courses or 20 pounds for three can make for a very good deal.

One permanent item appears to be the crab soup - a broth really - as intense as you could ever imagine. Flavor satiety comes pretty quickly with this, so I'd recommend sharing (even among four people); maybe you can get the server to bring you teacups, something that only occurred to me afterward.

The servers we had on one visit could hardly be bothered to bring us food, so it wouldn't have worked anyway. The restaurant has something of a reputation for having a "difficult" time with service, though we fared better on other visits.

In any case, the food is generally quite successful. Broiled mackerel, simply served, was perfect; radicchio with pork, the same, with the radicchio stealing the show from the anything-but-shabby pork; a salad of greens had a real fresh-from-the garden feel. Quo Vadis has long been an easy, decent choice for pretheater, but now it seems to be actually worth going to for the food.

Quo Vadis, 26-29 Dean St., Soho; (44-207) 437-9585; quovadissoho.co.uk. An average meal for two, without drinks or tip, runs about 50 pounds.

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