The first time I bought a pie from a bakery in Bromley, I genuinely thought there’d been a mistake. I’d ordered a chicken and mushroom pie expecting what any self-respecting New Zealander would expect – a full pastry case, golden on all sides, with a solid base you could hold in your hand while you ate it walking down the street. What I got was a ceramic dish of filling with a pastry lid sitting on top like a hat. No base. No sides. Just a soggy little roof over some stew. I stood in the street staring at it, fork in hand, and thought: I have made a terrible decision moving here.
I’m joking. Mostly. But food was one of those unexpected flashpoints in my first few months in London that caught me completely off guard. I’d braced myself for the big stuff – the NMC registration process, the homesickness, the weather. I hadn’t braced myself for the small, daily, sensory ways that being far from home would get under my skin, and almost all of them came back to food.
The Supermarket Identity Crisis
My first trip to a big Tesco near my flat in Bromley was an experience I can only describe as mildly dissociative. Everything looked almost right but wasn’t quite. The milk came in quantities I didn’t recognise. The butter was in brands I’d never seen. I spent ten minutes looking for Whittaker’s chocolate before accepting that it wasn’t going to appear, and then another five minutes standing in the biscuit aisle trying to work out what a digestive was and whether I’d like it. I couldn’t find decent crackers. The bread was different. Even the eggs were a different size. The cheese section was bewildering – an entire wall of cheddars that all looked identical but apparently represented deeply held regional loyalties I wasn’t yet equipped to understand.
None of these things matter individually, and I knew that even at the time. But collectively, they left me feeling strangely unmoored. I think when you move to a country that speaks the same language and shares a lot of the same cultural touchstones, you expect daily life to feel familiar. And it does – right up until you’re standing in a supermarket aisle near tears because you can’t find Marmite and the British version isn’t the same thing no matter what anyone tells you.
The thing nobody warns you about with homesickness is that it doesn’t always arrive as a grand, sweeping sadness. Sometimes it’s just the absence of a specific flavour you didn’t even know you were attached to.
Learning to Love What’s Here
It took me a few months, but I eventually stopped trying to replicate New Zealand in a London postcode and started actually paying attention to what British food does well. And there’s plenty. A proper Sunday roast with all the trimmings is one of the great meals of the world and I’ll defend that position to anyone. The curry scene in London is extraordinary – I’d never had a good vindaloo before moving here, and now I have strong opinions about which places on the high street do the best one. Fish and chips from a genuinely good chippie, eaten out of paper on a bench, is a perfect meal. And the sheer variety of food available in London – the Turkish bakeries, the Vietnamese places in Hackney, the little Ethiopian restaurant I found near work – is something Auckland simply can’t match at that scale.
I also discovered the glory of the M&S food hall, which I now treat as a kind of secular temple. Their ready meals got me through some rough post-shift evenings when I was too tired to cook but too hungry to sleep. No shame in that.
The pies, though – I maintain my position. A pie needs a base.
Coffee, or the Lack Thereof
I need to talk about the coffee, because if you’re a Kiwi moving to London, this is going to be one of your first and most persistent frustrations.
New Zealand has genuinely excellent coffee culture. I don’t say that as some kind of national boast – it’s just a fact. Flat whites were popularised in New Zealand and Australia, and the standard café in any mid-sized Kiwi town will serve you a properly extracted espresso-based coffee with well-textured milk. It’s not a luxury there. It’s a baseline.
London, by contrast, is a city of extremes. There are some absolutely brilliant specialty coffee shops – places where the baristas know their single origins and the milk is stretched beautifully. And there are also vast chain operations where the coffee tastes like it was made by someone who had the concept of espresso described to them over a bad phone line. The middle ground, which is where most New Zealand cafés sit, barely exists here. You’re either getting something wonderful or something tragic, and the wonderful option usually requires a deliberate detour and a longer queue.
Finding My Coffee Routine
In my first few weeks in Bromley, I went through what I now think of as my coffee grief cycle. Denial came first – surely the next place would be better. Then anger – how can a city this size not have consistent coffee? Bargaining followed – maybe if I order a long black instead of a flat white, it’ll be harder to ruin. Depression hit around week three, when I ordered a flat white from a well-known chain and received what I can only describe as hot milk with a rumour of coffee. Acceptance came eventually, but only after I found two local spots that met my standards and committed to visiting them exclusively. One of them is run by an Aussie, which I refuse to acknowledge publicly but am quietly grateful for.
My advice to any Kiwi landing in London: find your coffee place early. Ask other Antipodeans – they will have opinions and they will share them passionately. Check the independent shops first. And if someone offers you instant, it’s perfectly acceptable to politely decline and quietly reassess the friendship.
Food as a Lifeline on Long Shifts
Here’s where the food story connects to the nursing story, because they’re more linked than you might think. When you’re working twelve-hour shifts in an NHS hospital – often nights – food becomes one of your few reliable comforts. A good meal in your break can turn a difficult shift around. A bad one can compound an already rough night.
I learned quickly to meal prep on my days off, partly for health and budget reasons, but partly because having something familiar and homemade waiting in my lunchbox was a small act of self-care that kept me grounded. I’d make big batches of pumpkin soup, lamb and kumara stew, or simple pasta bakes – nothing fancy, but things that tasted like home and reheated well in a staff room microwave.
The other nurses on my ward caught on quickly. One of my colleagues, a Filipino nurse named Joy, started bringing lumpia for the night shift, and a Polish nurse called Magda would bring pierogi. Before long, we had an unofficial food-sharing arrangement on night shifts that became one of the best parts of the job. Nothing bonds a group of tired, overworked nurses at three in the morning quite like someone pulling a Tupperware container of homemade food out of the fridge and passing it around.
I brought a pavlova to the ward Christmas party. Half my colleagues had never had one. It vanished in minutes, and for the rest of December I was known exclusively as the pavlova nurse, which is frankly the best professional reputation I’ve ever had.
Making Peace With It All
I’ve been in London for a while now, and my relationship with food here has settled into something comfortable. I’ve stopped mourning what I can’t get and started appreciating what I can. I’ve found a shop in central London that stocks some New Zealand products – Whittaker’s, Pic’s peanut butter, a few other essentials – and I allow myself an occasional overpriced trip there when I need a taste of home. My parents send a care package every few months with biscuits and lollies, and I ration them like they’re medical supplies.
But more than that, I’ve come to see food as one of the most interesting parts of being an immigrant. It forces you to notice things you’d normally take for granted. It connects you to other people who are also far from home. And it gives you these small, daily rituals – the morning coffee, the meal-prepped lunch, the Sunday roast at the pub – that slowly turn a foreign city into your city.
I still miss a proper New Zealand meat pie more than I probably should. But I’ve made my peace with the pastry lid. I just eat around it and pretend it’s a stew. Which, if we’re being honest, is exactly what it is.