Sunday roast: the pub ritual, what to order and what to avoid

Overview

A Sunday roast is not London’s own dish, and it belongs to the whole of Britain and to the home kitchen at least as much as to any restaurant. It is the national Sunday lunch: a joint of roasted meat, roast potatoes, a Yorkshire pudding, seasonal vegetables and gravy, eaten in the early afternoon. Its roots are domestic and old — the practice of putting a joint in to roast before church and sitting down to it on the way home — and for most British families it still happens at a kitchen table, not out.

What London offers a visitor is the pub version of it, and that is a genuine and specific thing worth seeking. The Sunday roast is the one meal that reliably fills a London pub, and a good pub takes it seriously: proper roast potatoes, a Yorkshire pudding the size of a fist, meat carved to order and often served pink if it is beef. The city guide already tells you the pub is a social institution and that you order at the bar; the roast is the ritual that institution is arguably built around, and Sunday lunchtime is when a pub is most itself.

So this article is about the pub roast: what the plate should contain, the words to order it with, and — the single most useful practical fact — why you cannot leave it to chance on the day.

What to order

The choice is the meat, and the four standards are beef, lamb, pork and chicken, with a nut roast as the usual vegetarian option. Each comes with its traditional partner, and knowing the pairing is most of the fluency:

• beef — the iconic one, and the one the Yorkshire pudding truly belongs to. Ask for it medium-rare or pink if you want it at its best; a good kitchen carves it that way by default and a well-done slab is a waste of the joint. Its condiment is horseradish, hot and sharp.
• lamb — richer, served with mint sauce, a sharp green vinegar-and-mint cut that offsets the fat.
• pork — the one to order if you want crackling, the sheet of hard roasted skin; its partner is apple sauce, and a good roast pork has a proper shard of crackling on the plate.
• chicken — the gentlest, and no worse for it.

Whatever the meat, the plate should carry the same supporting cast, and their quality is how you judge the kitchen: roast potatoes that are crisp and blistered outside and soft within (not pale and greasy), a Yorkshire pudding that is puffed and hollow, greens and root vegetables, and gravy poured generously. Two things worth knowing to order: cauliflower cheese is the great optional extra, usually ordered as an add-on and worth it; and where a menu offers “all the trimmings” or a shared platter, that is the way to get the fullest plate. A Yorkshire pudding on a lamb or pork roast is now normal in pubs even though it began as a beef partner — ask for one if it is not automatic.

What to avoid

The thing to avoid has a name and a shape: the carvery, in its worst form. A proper carvery can be excellent, but the tourist-facing version — meat sitting grey under heat lamps at a steam table, roast potatoes going soft in a tray, “all you can eat” for a flat price near a major sight — is the roast reduced to volume catering. The tell is that the food is held hot in bulk rather than plated to order, and that the meat has the uniform, faintly steamed look of something that has waited.

The sharper tell is the calendar. A Sunday roast is, definitionally, a Sunday meal; a good pub roasts its joints for that one service and stops. So a place advertising “roast dinner served all week” is almost never roasting to order — it is holding or reheating, because nobody carves fresh joints seven days a week for a handful of orders. The roast that is available every day is the roast to be suspicious of.

And be wary of the plate that is thin where it should be generous: a single slice of pale, processed-looking meat, a Yorkshire pudding straight from a freezer bag, potatoes that are clearly par-fried and reheated. None of this is about a fancy kitchen — a plain neighbourhood pub does the roast better than most — it is about whether the kitchen actually cooked on the day or assembled from the freezer.

Practicalities

A Sunday roast in a London pub runs to roughly £16 to £24 for a single plate, more for a sharing joint or a beef wellington-style centrepiece, less at a plain local. A number far below that is worth a second look at the carvery question above; a number far above it is buying the room and the postcode more than the meat.

The one fact that changes your day: a good roast sells out, and you should book. A pub makes a finite number of each joint for the single Sunday service, and the popular ones are gone by mid-afternoon — the beef usually first. Service typically runs from around midday to four or five in the afternoon, but “we stopped roasts an hour ago” is a real and common answer at three o’clock on a busy Sunday. Reserving a table, and ideally saying which meat you want when you do, is the difference between the meal you came for and a menu of what is left. Turning up hungry at two on spec, at a place you have not booked, is the way to miss it.

It is a leisurely, single-sitting meal rather than a quick bite: the pub expects you to settle in for a couple of hours, order a drink at the bar first, and eat slowly. Payment follows the city guide’s card-and-phone norm, and a service charge is often added to a sit-down roast, so check the bill before adding more. And it is worth arriving with an appetite and nothing planned after — the roast is designed to be the afternoon, not an item in it.