A street the station keeps trying to swallow
Drummond Street runs west from the back of Euston station towards Hampstead Road, and for more than half a century it has been one of the most rewarding streets in London for a quick, serious meal eaten without ceremony. Gujarati and Bangladeshi families settled in the streets around it from the sixties onwards, and the shops and kitchens they opened, selling sweets, spices, vegetarian snacks and full thalis, turned a plain street behind a railway terminus into something close to a small neighbourhood of its own.
It has never had an easy relationship with the station next door. The street was cut short when Euston was rebuilt in the sixties, and since 2019 the building of HS2 has cleared a great deal of its eastern end, closed old routes and put up long lines of hoarding. The kitchens that remain have held on through all of it, and the reward for anyone who finds them is a meal that is better, faster and far more interesting than anything on the concourse.
Getting there from the concourse
Older guides say two minutes from the platforms. With the construction work, it is more honest to allow five to ten, and to check the route before you rely on it, since the hoardings and the walkways around the western side of the station have moved more than once. The dependable approach is to leave the station by the main front onto Euston Road, walk west along the road to Euston Square, and turn north up one of the side streets; Drummond Street crosses them a few minutes up.
Coming back, reverse the walk and add a margin. The station is large, the concourse is often crowded, and the walk from the front entrance to the far platforms is longer than it looks. For a train that matters, plan to be back inside the station at least fifteen minutes before it leaves.
The kitchens that have outlasted everything
Diwana Bhel Poori House is the one everybody names, and with reason. It opened on Drummond Street around 1970 and claims to be the oldest South Indian vegetarian restaurant in Britain; the room is simple, the service quick, and the menu built around the street snacks of western India, bhel poori, sev poori, crisp dosas and thalis, alongside dishes from further south. It is a room where a regular of forty years and a student from the university up the road sit at the next table and order the same thing.
A few doors along, Ambala opened its first sweet shop on this street in 1965, and a box of Indian sweets from the place that started it all is still the best thing to carry onto a long train. Ravi Shankar and Chutneys, both vegetarian dining rooms, have fed the street for decades too, and there are Bangladeshi restaurants and grocers in between for anyone who would rather eat meat. None of it is fashionable, which is precisely the point.
How long each meal really takes
This is the question that matters, so here is the honest version. A plate of bhel poori or samosas with a cup of tea, eaten at the table and not lingered over, takes fifteen to twenty minutes from the door. A dosa, which is made to order and arrives hot, takes more like thirty. A thali, several small dishes on one tray, is forty minutes if you eat it properly, which you should. A proper sit down meal with starters, mains and conversation is an hour at the very least, and on a busy evening longer.
Then add the walk back, ten minutes if you know the way, and the fifteen minutes inside the station. So with an hour before departure, the honest choice is a snack. With ninety minutes, a dosa or a thali is comfortable. With two hours or more, you can sit down properly and still be on the platform early. Euston has long had a habit of announcing platforms late, and the scramble when a busy train is called is part of the station's reputation, so being back in good time is worth more here than at most termini.
Ninety minutes between a meeting and a train
A good many evenings on this site are built around a departure board, and that is what trains out and trips away exists for. Ninety minutes at £400 fits a meal on Drummond Street before a train almost exactly: meet, walk round, eat without hurrying and walk back in time. Two hours at £500 allows a drink first, at one of the hotels facing the station, or a slower walk along the Euston Road.
Some departures leave room for a whole evening. The overnight sleeper to Scotland leaves Euston in the late evening, which gives a traveller the chance of three hours at £700 and a proper dinner before boarding. Send the desk the train time and the hour you are free from, and Verity will suggest a meeting place, often the entrance of the Wellcome Collection on the Euston Road, which is easy to find and a few minutes from both the station and the street. She is handed her fee in person on arrival, before you set off for the street. For a conference guest walking over from Regent's Park, the guide to evenings after the Royal College of Physicians covers the first half of the walk.
Who eats here before a train
Stacy is anchored at Euston and knows Drummond Street better than anybody on the list; she has her order settled before she sits down and keeps a quiet eye on the time on your behalf. Luna, also at Euston, is energetic and curious and likes to start in the galleries along the road before eating.
From St Pancras, eight minutes east, Sonya is one of five women on the toned page, warm, slightly formal and entirely at ease at a formica table. Laura, another of the five, comes down the Victoria line from Finsbury Park in a matter of minutes and is good with an exact hour, which is what a departure board requires. If your train is from Kings Cross instead, the same street is only ten minutes further to walk.
Cross filed: most of the names on this sheet also sit in the brunettes drawer of the moodboard.