Why is bringing lunch from home not an option?

He was told that there is no restaurant close by their workplace and will be working in Heathrow Airport don't seem to match up. Surely there are restaurants at the airport? If places at the airport itself don't qualify, please clarify that further.

If his workplace is somewhere away from the passenger terminals, the restaurants there may not be easily reachable. But in that case "reachable by foot" is extremely vague and depends heavily on where at the airport the workplace is.

@gsamaras do you mean this British Airways West Base?

@JJJ yeah, that's it! :D

The thing I'm really surprised nobody has brought up yet: Just because you can't cook, doesn't mean you can't bring food to work. Just get an extra portion from your favorite place in the evening and warm it up at work. Seems like the obvious solution to that problem.

@Voo but that's exactly the question. Where do get that food from...

@gsamaras Since the asker presumably currently eats food, from the same place as now ;)

He just arrived @Voo, and is deeply disappointed by the choices around his home, which are all Indian, with no safe no-spicy food for him. :/

Could he buy lunches at the grocery store that don't require cooking (or minimal preparation)? Salads, deli items, fruit and veggies, etc...?

I will suggest that to him too..

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because "where can an employee eat lunch at or near his regular place of work?" has nothing whatsoever to do with travel.

@DavidRicherby so it'd be okay if a traveller asked but not if someone who regularly frequents the area (in this case for work) does? Isn't the criteria that the question is useful for travellers? In this case, it might be, for example when I want to have lunch (near but not at the airport) before returning my rental and travelling to the airport. You really should see the bigger picture rather than the narrower use case here.

@JJJ As a general rule of thumb, if a local would ask exactly the same question, it's not a travel question. Well, this is a local who's asking. It's also primarily opinion-based. And literally a shopping question. If you want to know where to go for lunch, ask Trip Advisor or Yelp.

@DavidRicherby it might look that way, but you'd be surprised of the distance between Munich and Heathrow. They even decided to fly there rather than have people walk. As for the asker's friend, they are new to the area as well, so not a local. I doubt a local would go on to TSE and ask this question, they may provide an answer though, having knowledge about places to eat locals tend to have. ;) As stated in the question, the criteria seem to be narrow enough to allow useful recommendations without eliciting list-style answers like we would see in factoids.

@JJJ I'm not seeing the relevance of Munich. Somebody who lives in a place is a local.

@DavidRicherby the asker lives in Munich and has never been to the UK. ;)

"Reachable only by foot or public transport" - you're in luck as a lot of London is easily reachable by public transport (there's the bus, underground, overground, DLR, tram, even the air line and river bus but those are more costly though highly recommended as a one-off for tourists), so should not be major problems with getting by by feet or public transport!

I guess it's only the time constrain as he will have to travel to a place that does food, eat it, and travel back, all within the lunch time. Due to this, I would suggest for him to pack whatever he would eat in evenings in a lunch box for the following day. I used to do that nearly every day some time ago where we had a few good Indian places nearby, I would get 2 portions of different curries every evening and then save one of them for lunch for the next day. Of course Indian is not an option here but can be similarly replaced with other dinner worthy food.

As for possible options for non-spicy and more healthy foods than fast food, I can suggest he tries (there must be some within a reasonable distance from Heathrow or maybe even in the airport itself!) the good old full English breakfast! It's considerably cheap, healthy and quite filling. Normally you can find it in a cafe but I'm not so familiar with the Heathrow area, so unfortunately won't be able to point to a specific place. But just an idea of what to look for when he's checking places out!

My parents loved the full English when we were transiting via London and had to spend the whole day in the city (so needed to get some food in the middle of the day that would be filling, not expensive and also not a McDonald's). 🙂It's their favourite after a non-spicy korma curry that they tried some years before.