Twenty-Five Quid, Five Postcodes: What a Chinese Takeaway Basket Buys in 2026
Photo: Stephen Sweeney, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There was a time when £25 was the most dependable number in British food. It bought a Chinese takeaway for three people, with a tub of something left over for the next day. In 2026 that same £25 is a dinner for two, and in a handful of postcodes it does not quite stretch to that either.
To see what has genuinely shifted, we priced an identical basket in five places: a chicken chow mein, an egg fried rice, a portion of salt and pepper chips, a tub of curry sauce and a bag of prawn crackers. Collection prices throughout, because adding delivery fees and app mark-ups to one town and not another muddies the comparison.
The same basket, five towns
Manchester (M14, independent, collection). Chow mein £8.90, egg fried rice £4.20, salt and pepper chips £5.40, curry sauce £2.80, prawn crackers £2.50. Total: £23.80. You have change for a can of pop, and that is about the extent of it.
Leeds (LS6). The same order lands at £22.90, with a bigger tub of chips than the Manchester version. Northern pricing still holds on staples, largely because rent on a high-street unit is doing less damage to the menu.
Milton Keynes (MK9). £26.40. The chow mein alone is £9.40 and the crackers are £3.10 — the crackers are the tell. In new-town suburbs with limited competition, the side dishes carry more of the price burden.
Cardiff (CF24). £25.60. Right on the line. A couple of years ago this basket wouldn't have troubled a twenty.
London (SE15). £31.10. At which point the honest advice is to drop the crackers and share the rice, because otherwise you are paying central-London rent through a polystyrene lid.
Why the figure keeps creeping
The temptation is to blame one thing. It is never one thing. Over the past few years, rice, cooking oil, packaging, energy and staff costs all moved upward at roughly the same time, and each one is a small enough percentage that no single increase looks worth a headline. Stack nine of them together on a menu and the chow mein is £1.50 more than it was.
Then there is the delivery layer. Commission on the big platforms can swallow a quarter or more of an order, and a lot of shops have responded by nudging menu prices up across the board rather than running two separate price lists. If you are collecting, you are sometimes paying a delivery-app price for the privilege of walking to the counter.
And the freebies have gone quiet. Prawn crackers used to arrive unasked. Now they are a £2.50–£3.10 line item in most of the country. The complimentary bag of fortune cookies has largely vanished. The old habit of upgrading you to a large tub for a pound is rarer than it was.
Where the value still hides
None of this means the Chinese takeaway has stopped being good value. It means it has stopped being cheap, and those are different words. The following still work in 2026:
Collect, if you possibly can. A 10–15% collection discount is common and it is the single easiest saving on the list. Many shops also throw in crackers when you order at the counter, which the app will charge you for.
Ring the shop. Ordering direct still beats the platforms on price at most independents, and you can ask whether the kitchen does a bigger tub for a modest top-up.
Lean on noodles. A chow mein or a ho fun is a whole meal in one tub — protein, carb, veg, sauce. Rice plus two mains plus a side is how a £25 basket turns into a £35 basket.
Order vegetable-forward. Aubergine in garlic sauce, mixed veg with cashews, braised tofu, beansprouts with spring onion. These are the dishes where the kitchen's margins are healthiest and the prices have moved least. They also happen to be the ones people skip.
Treat the sides as a decision, not a reflex. Chips, crackers and curry sauce are now a realistic £10 of a £25 spend. Pick two, not three.
Ignore the prawn premium. King prawn anything commands a hefty uplift in 2026. Chicken and char siu still do the job in a chow mein for a lot less.
The £25 basket that still works
A large house special rice at around £10.50, salt and pepper chips at £5.20, mixed vegetables in garlic sauce at £6.20 and one tub of curry sauce at £2.80. That comes to £24.70 and it feeds two adults comfortably, with a bit of rice left for lunch. It has no chow mein, no crackers and no sweet and sour, and it does not need them.
The cheap-treat reputation has gone, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours. But £25 is still enough for a proper Friday dinner if you spend it deliberately rather than by habit.
