The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Wednesday.
Hello again.
The glittering prize of another long bank holiday weekend means that huge numbers of Londoners are going to be eating pub and restaurant roasts this Sunday. There will be boulderous beef dripping roasties, glossily burnished free-range chickens and crisp, bubbled lengths of pork crackling; there will be seething shared pans of truffled cauliflower cheese, ribboned slices of roast beef, and puffy, gnarled toques of giant Yorkshire pudding. There will, of course, be a great flowing river of gravy.
But here is the more pertinent, and perhaps uncomfortable question. Just how many of these roasts will actively justify the considerable hype and fuss? Yes, London is a Sunday roast city: every week, places as diverse as Straker’s and DakaDaka enter the fray and primetime bookings at The Ned’s £120-per-head turbo-carvery aren’t generally available this side of late June. But, for a while now, more dissenting voices in the industry have started to rail against what they see as a wildly inconsistent gastronomic subgenre, marked by desiccated slices of lamb and solid, day-old yorkies so rigid they could double as projectiles. Elsewhere, more operators seem to be swerving traditional roasts for something more bespoke, original and achievable at scale. And, speaking personally, I don’t really want to contemplate the number of times that I have excitedly dropped circa £30 on a gravy-slicked plate of food that is, at best, perfunctory. So is it time we said the unsayable? Is the restaurant roast in need of a drastic rethink?
Well, for chef Ben Lippett – veteran of professional kitchens like Elystan Street and Orasay, author of bestselling recipe book How I Cook and avowed roast-sceptic – many of the problems are to do with the fundamentals of what the dish generally constitutes. “The best thing about a roast is that it can be a real shoot-it-into-my-veins dose of nostalgia,” he says. “But in the same way that a Christmas dinner is like an insane, 16-element plate of food, the average roast just becomes a game of who can fit the most flavours on a plate. People fall into the trap of trying to do 12 things well but, inevitably, they only land five of those planes and the other seven crash into the sea.”
This maximalism trap is, of course, especially apparent in pubs and restaurants, where there is an imperative to offer something a level above a domestic roast. But as Lippett (who says he had people “wringing their hands” online when he expressed his feelings about pub roasts in an interview last year) notes, the “protective nostalgia” incited by a Sunday roast can be inhibiting for chefs. “Roasts are a really good money spinner … but it can become this quite boring thing you have to do at the end of the week,” he says.
It’s perhaps not a surprise then that more and more pubs and restaurants are breaking rank. At the Michelin Guide-listed Waterman’s Arms in Barnes, the roast comprises shareable cuts of porchetta or lamb shoulder with bespoke accompaniments rather than Yorkshire puddings and gravy (“Occasionally we get asked and people can’t believe we don’t have them,” says founder Joe Grossman). At Mangal II, meanwhile, it is the Turkish-accented likes of braised lamb shoulder and ocakbasi-fired butterfly mackerel. Head to Dorian in recent weeks and you’ll have witnessed head chef Max Coen letting different members of his kitchen team reimagine the Sabbath as a day for buttermilk fried guinea fowl or bavette steak tacos laced with blood orange yoghurt. And then there is The Macbeth in Hoxton – Jamie Allan’s Portuguese-inspired gastro-boozer where, more recently, Sunday hordes have been tucking into whole-roast peri-peri chickens that Lippett certifies as “absolutely delicious”.
In that spirit, this past Sunday, I took myself to The White Horse in Peckham for the Northern Thai Sunday feast from Rice Paddy, Irish chef Paul Asher’s acclaimed residency. It comprised a metal platter of sharply executed meats – fragrant, gushingly succulent chicken; moreish, ultra-crisp pork belly; a house-made length of sai ua sausage, purring with lemongrass – all brought together by sticky rice, an outrageous burnt aubergine relish and other vivid fixings. True, there are still terrific, well-executed traditional plates of meat and gravy to be found all over London. But this was a reminder that intense comfort and freewheeling creativity can co-exist. And that, really, the Sunday roast can be as exciting as we want it to be.
For Jimi Famurewa’s dish of the week, sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Wednesday.
Got a question about London's dining scene that you'd like Jimi to answer, or a hot tip about a great place to eat or drink in London? Email jimi@broadsheet.com.
