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Craving real Sicilian food in London, any recommendations on authentic Italian restaurants locals frequent?
if you're up for a trek, go to Vicolo in brixton. it's a tiny deli that does dinner a few nights a week, proper family run. i swear half the people there are speaking italian and the nonna is sometimes in the back. the pasta is made fresh daily and they do a simple cacio e pepe that beats most places charging triple. just check their hours before you go, they're not always open
honestly, go to Bocca di Lupo in Soho. it's not exactly a hole-in-the-wall but theres always italian families there and the menu changes by region, so you get real seasonal stuff. my mate from Palermo reckons their granita is the closest hes had outside sicily
Trullo in Spitalfields. It's always busy, always buzzing, and the food is phenomenal. Not specifically Sicilian, but proper Italian home cooking. You'll see plenty of Italians there.
What are some innovative ways to anonymously compare rental prices in a city?
SpareRoom's "rooms wanted" ads are underrated for this. people post what they're currently paying alongside what they want next, so you can scrape a rough sense of going rates by postcode without anyone knowing you looked. it skews young and flatshare heavy tho, so not much use if you're after 2-beds in zone 2.
Another one is just the depozit or tenancy deposit scheme data. not public-facing, but your council's housing officer can tell you median rents from deposit registrations if you email them under FOI. takes weeks, but its proper anon and nobody clocks u.
Rightmove and Zoopla only show asking rents, which are often 10 to 15 percent above what a place actually goes for, so they're a poor benchmark. The trick I've used is the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, which breaks things down to borough level and is genuinely anonymous since it's aggregate data, no listing or account needed. For something more granular, the London Renters Union runs a rent reporting tool where you submit what you're paying with your postcode and it maps it against others nearby, though the coverage is patchy outside the inner boroughs.
the openrent "rent check" thing is decent for zones 3-4 where the unions tool barely reaches. also worth checking the london.gov.uk planning portal for new build applications, they list "affordable" and market rent figures per unit in the viability assessments, which is basically the developer telling the council what they expect to charge. bit of a faff to dig through but its public, anonymous & nobody knows ur looking
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