Roast Dinners in London

OMG roast dinner in a scary halal no-alcohol restaurant, Meli-Melo on Brick Lane.

Alcohol-free restaurant…but no, this isn’t a Halloween special.

So of all the things I’ve done on Brick Lane – drinking beer, eating curry, a tech jobs fair with a ball pit, photography exhibition, ketamine, shuffleboard, Mccain’s roast potato pop-up – I’d never had a roast dinner on Brick Lane.

The other big new thing this week, apart from JD Vance definitely not having an affair with Erica Kirk, was that I finally had the balls to release the completely new version of Roast Dinners in London.

So the main idea behind it was to try to bring some more of the useful pages to the home page, like “best roast dinner in central London”, or the roastatistics pages which I love, but nobody else seems to care about.

The maps page has been rebuilt from scratch, and I will likely add filters to this so you can look for places with say, a rating over 8, on the map.

Also the league of roasts has been rebuilt completely – now with a decent selection of filters, so you can filter by area, price, rating, etc. You know you want to hug me.

Meliorate

For those technically interested, it’s now a headless website, the b/e is still WordPress, the f/e is built with Astro, so it ships zero JavaScript by default, and once I’ve sorted out the image delivery, will be mega quick to load (it already is pretty speedy). Hosted on Vercel, using GraphQL to retrieve data – Astro allows the concept of islands, so React is used for the filtering logic, etc, on the league table – but nowhere else.

I’ve noticed a few bugs, curiously I’ve seen that the league table now shows that I’ve reviewed 350 places, and the old website had 348…so not quite sure what that discrepancy is!

If you notice anything wrong, or anything that could be improved, or you just think the new website is even sexier than the old one, drop me an e-mail – I’d be really keen to hear how it can be improved, and even keener to hear that my efforts to re-develop the site are appreciated, and exceptionally keen to hear from you if you are Latina and single. Hhhhhhhhh…ola.

Anyway, I was sat in Brewdog (yeah I know the owner is a c*nt but I needed a £10 can of IPA) when I discovered that the restaurant I’d booked for a roast dinner was alcohol-free. Oops.

But not to bother, as they had a list of alcohol-free cocktails, which is what I live for. In January.

I tried to order the “For Her”, for jokes, but it wasn’t available – I didn’t quite understand if it wasn’t available completely, or it just wasn’t available to blokes.

The Poire William was actually alright, I’m not a alcohol-full cocktail person anyway, so the mixture of pear and nosecco was enjoyable enough.

Mellifluous

It would really tickle my woke side if the best roast dinner of the year was in a Muslim-run halal restaurant, where alcohol is prohibited – after yet more predictably boring Muslim-bashing on certain corners of the internet.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Meli-Melo was a recommendation on Reddit, another corner of the internet with occasionally wild views, including recently when I gave some roast dinner advice, and then was told “you don’t know anything about roast dinners”.

Clearly not after possibly having reviewed 350 roast dinners, or maybe 348 depending on which version of my website you believe.

On the menu was chicken supreme at £22.00, beef sirloin at £24.00, lamb rack at £24.00 and lamb shank at £24.00 – it was the latter I ordered, as I’d clocked it looking a little sexy on Google reviews.

To accompany our roasts, there was also some screaming – both from a table of young women, and also from a young child on another table. But otherwise it was a pleasant enough place, some Islamic-style music on low and pictures of Morocco on a large screen.

The décor was an odd mix, some exposed brickwork and corrugated iron to remind you it’s Brick Lane, but then also some fake greenery and that large TV screen gave it a, erm, tackier edge.

And, yes, Meli-Melo is halal, and if you are about to complain about halal methods and aren’t a vegan, then we all know what you really mean, in the same way that we all know what Nigel Farage needing to know the identity of anyone committing a crime really is about.

Meliorative

Our roasts took around 15 minutes to arrive, whilst I pretended to enjoy my non-alcoholic cocktail.

A curious presentation but I’m not against it – with small blobs of mustard, tartare sauce (I think) and something else I never understood.

And then there was a swirl of what I assume was described on the menu as “my indulgent neep cream” which sounds a bit like Donald Trump selling Avon, but actually was one of the better purees I’ve had.

Sweet, perhaps with coconut or something along those lines, tasting more of squash/pumpkin than “neeps”.

Some of the vegetables were spicy (ah, perhaps I really am on Brick Lane) – notably the roasted carrots which were utterly delicious, and the small bit of cauliflower, again – a delight with the spice.

I didn’t notice any spice on the broccoli or green beans, both of which were soft enough, with a slight squeak to the green beans.

Finally there was some parsnip too, which was a little dry, but also really flavoursome.

Melodrama

Again the roast potatoes were spiced, with some crispy sides and being quite soft inside – I really enjoyed these, though not quite gold standard like the ones at The Audley Public House the other Sunday.

Though my accomplice wasn’t so keen – hers were larger and lacked any crisp.

The Yorkshire pudding was alright, a bit cold and dry but nicely formed with some softness inside.

I enjoyed the lamb shank – it had been slow-cooked and as soon as my fork touched it, it fell off the bone. Though I do think the spice elsewhere in the meal perhaps overshadowed the taste of the lamb, which also again was a little on the dry side.

I tried my accomplice’s chicken supreme, and this was actually stunning – crispy skin and seriously juicy chicken. The level of stunning I hoped my lamb would be, but wasn’t quite – though I don’t want to denigrate the lamb too much, this chicken was sensational.

And finally the gravy – each roast had it’s own gravy, which is the level of detail I’d like to see, unlike a few times recently when it was a shared vegetarian (SIGH) gravy, looking at you The Blue Stoops, for example.

Perhaps you cannot get past the concept of gravy being near-yellow, but I can – this was a super thick gravy, so thick that I turned the tiny little extra gravy boat (stop the small gravy boats) upside down and it didn’t come out. Apart from being deliriously thick, it was creamy and tasted of lamb. I’m told the gravy that came with the chicken was more traditional and also really good.

By the way, I do own the domain name, stopthesmallboats.co.uk, I will eventually do something with it, it will be nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with gravy boats/thimbles.

Meli-Melo

So a spicy roast dinner on Brick Lane. Whatever next?

Actually the roast dinner after the next one is seriously going to freak people out, mwah ha ha ha insert evil laugh.

I really enjoyed the roast dinner at Meli-Melo, helped by the spicing of the vegetables which I loved, good roasties, slow-cooked lamb and proper thick, creamy gravy that clearly used the lamb stock to make it.

The service was super sweet and friendly, the mocktail was…alright, the screaming was painful – though I think the chef did have a word, from what I can see, so kudos for that.

Downsides – well the yorkie was a bit cold and dry, and the lamb wasn’t as tasty as I had hoped – perhaps I was just jealous of my accomplice’s chicken. Traditionalists may not be amused by this roast dinner, but when you’ve either had 348 or 350 roast dinners in London, a little bit of spice is just a delight.

My accomplice with the stunning chicken scored it an 8.20, and my score is pretty similar, an 8.12 out of 10. The first time in 5 months that I’ve scored somewhere above an 8.

I’ll be back next Sunday, going to a riskier choice of venue – one which I’ve heard has stunning meat, but whether it is any good outside of the meat…we shall see.