All posts tagged: roast

The Old Red Cow, Smithfield

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Looking for the perfect place for your Sunday Roast? Of course you are. Well the Old Red Cow isn’t perfect, but you could do a lot worse in the capital. This independent pub is situated on the doorstep of London’s legendary meat market, Smithfield, so there’s no excuse for shoddy roasts here. First impressions were good – it’s a homely, cosy little pub that was absolutely heaving on our visit despite being in the middle of bloody nowhere (Smithfield is deserted of a weekend, positively ghostly). On Sundays the Old Red Cow only does roast dinners. On this occasion pork belly, roast beef, or some sort of nonsense vegetarian option probably involving nuts and seeds (I jest, I jest, it was vegetable parmigiana). The wine list is a bit odd. It’s doing the Innocent Smoothies we’re oh so friendly and kitsch-ed up to our eyeballs thing, you see. Plonk, they say, with a hilarious smirk as if daring you to order it. I did though. Then the food arrived, and this just turned the whole …

The Bull, Islington

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The Bull is a pretty substandard pub which seems to be in the midst of some sort of identity crisis. Look at it in real life and you see a dark, grubby little public house complete with sticky flooring and dusty sofas. Look at its website, or indeed its menus, and you see a snazzy London gastropub where you might reasonably expect a decent Sunday Roast. This is not the case. The beginnings of Sunday lunch at The Bull were not wholly awful. We tried some olives, black pudding and whitebait. These were all pleasant. We scoffed them all up, excited for the roasts that were to come. We needn’t have been. A meal masquerading as a Sunday Roast then arrived. It was no such thing. It was a plate of dried out and sad looking slices of meat, vegetables that had withered away and died many moons previously, and three tiddly roast potatoes that were actively offensive. Aunt Bessie made them. The Bull did not. The Bull is a liar and a beast. We …