Roast Dinners in London

This week I went back to the scene of a crime, Rabbit in Chelsea.

No, not this crime:

But an almost equally terrifying crime, of the world’s smallest roast dinner:

Granted, I was eating at a place called Rabbit, so maybe you’d expect rabbit-sized portions, I thought maybe they were playing on the name – and hence “rabbit food”.

They actually provided sprouts…I mean a sprout, halved – one of the best sprouts I’d ever tasted, but also just one sprout.

The promised carrots and Yorkshire pudding on the menu were missing – new potatoes replaced roast potatoes. It seemed a joke, but maybe the joke was on us.

What’s up, doc…tor gravy

Previous re-reviews have mostly been because I thought somewhere might have been too highly rated.

The classic example was Bar & Block, which I originally scored an 8.34 – now re-reviewed at a truly abysmal 3.90. Phew…nobody will now go and then be like “that Lord Gravy knows shit about roast dinners”.

The Old Red Cow was another – used to be my 15th best roast dinner, scored an 8.62. But re-opened after the pandemic, I think with new owners – and fucking hell it was grim – with a new score of 4.66 out of 10.

So I guess it should also work the other way, Rabbit being the sister restaurant of Sussex Bar & Restaurant which I highly rated in 2024, so I thought maybe there was a case for a re-review. Plus the roast potatoes on Google reviews looked pretty banging:

And, you know, my review was written just over 8 years ago – I’ve changed, maybe I was a tad too harsh, maybe I should be more accepting of tiny plates now I’ve lived in London for, jeez, 10 years this August.

Who knows, maybe in another 8 years time I’ll regret having called King Farage a self-serving, hypocritical, racist grifter, when I’m living in exile in the Moscow region of Greater Ukraine.

P-p-p-please give me a whole plate of roast dinner

The restaurant itself is on the King’s Road, the Chelsea road of the cute boutiques with beautifully designed layouts of fabulous outfits – women’s clothes shops obviously, because us guys only wear grey, black, white, brown and maybe navy blue if we are feeling as wild as Yosemite Sam. I might have had some lighter shades of blue on, but I’m a weirdo. You know that already. This is roast dinner review 365. Why?

I was wondering the other day, what happens if AI actually does take my job. Because…my job is how I pay for this blog. Hmmm.

Anyway, let’s pretend AI is just a bit of fun and the hundreds of billions of dollars that Google, etc are investing in it are pretty much just so we can all make better memes.

On the menu was beef sirloin at £29.50, leg of lamb at £28.00, rotisserie chicken at £26.00, pork belly at £28.00 or a vegetarian wellington at £24.00 – which wasn’t vegan, and I had my vegan accomplice with me.

PANIC MODE.

Thankfully they came up with a freestyle lunch for her. Chef probably used AI, right?

I went for the chicken, which came with “farm vegetables” – as opposed to vegetables from…a disused office in Croydon? A nuclear power plant?

Who framed Roger Roast Potato

So, everything was on an annoyingly small plate but that was about the limit of my frustrations.

You know what? Nope, because I haven’t written the sentence yet, but I’m going to mix things up and describe the roast dinner in graph format this week:

You don’t really prefer my writing to AI generated graphs do you? Fine…

Later I found myself thinking about dessert, where I met the stupidest character of them all, Yosemite Sam

The dark carrot tasted like roasted beetroot – probably it was actually beetroot.

The carrot was soft and roasted – plus there was a medley of tiny cubes, swede and…turnip? Note I’m not describing any flavours, partly because I’m an imbecile (ironically I had to Google how to spell imbecile), but also because I could only really taste the gravy.

What did have flavour was the spoonful of cabbage, quite potent in a mustard-ish kind of way, but pleasantly fragrant too. Quite interesting.

You could probably argue that the parsnip was a tad too al dente, and didn’t have as much flavour as it could have, but it was still pretty good.

Roast potatoes were crispy. OMG I know – the best of 2026 so far, not that the competition is too great. Fluffy on the inside, pretty crispy on the outside – these were good quality.

The Yorkshire pudding was a bit on the cold side, but also it was freshly made – it was quite soft and fluffy inside, it had been made the same day. Small mercies.

The rotisserie chicken was served as breast and leg portion – for some reason the breast was upside down, so maybe not presentationally the best, but hey, Hull boy having a £26.00 roast dinner in Chelsea.

It was really quite smokey, full of flavour – the breast succulent, the leg meat perhaps not quite so giving and the thigh meat not as succulent as it can be, but I’m being picky. This was pretty damn delicious.

Finally, the gravy – well that was pretty decent, though really I could taste the rotisserie chicken’s smokiness more. Otherwise a good consistency, a tad oily though – and it probably was pretty meaty.

Rabbit, Chelsea

Quite clearly this is the first re-review where the score is going up – which is a bit of a relief as I’m not really keen to waste a Sunday re-reviewing somewhere and giving out roughly the same score. Either it needs to go down significantly, or up.

I do like Rabbit as a restaurant – looking at some of the other food coming out, there were some delectable-looking croquettes being served, and everything on Google Maps reviews does look delicious – it is the kind of neighbourhood bistro I wish I had nearby in Croydon. Yeah…keep dreaming but we do have a Dave’s Hot Chicken now which Chelsea doesn’t have.

One of my 100 website ideas that I’m yet to do anything with because I’m too busy with an actual job, and a blog, and stuff like occasionally cleaning the flat, is to do a Croydon fried chicken page. Not quite worked it out in my head yet. Surprisingly I haven’t bought the domain name yet…yes I do have a string of domain names which I bought and did absolutely nothing with.

Anyway, Rabbit is a gorgeous, if slightly cramped restaurant – classic looking outside, with almost a French bistro style, but not. Green. Mirrors. Plus the service was super friendly – occasionally not easy to find anyone, but mostly service was really charming.

Gosh the more I think about it, the happier I am with this up-rating. By the way, if you see anywhere on my league table which you think is due a re-review (say pre-pandemic era) do drop me a note.

Scores? Well I rated most things, especially the roast potatoes and the smokey rotisserie chicken. Most of the vegetables were good too.

My regular accomplice scored it an 8.15, and I’m thinking the same – but sibling competition means that I cannot score it the same, so I’ll go for an 8.14 out of 10.

Did my sister get better roast potatoes than me? Hmmm. Also the vegan mystery dish was apparently very good too…lentils, cauliflower and other veganish things that I might eat on a Monday but definitely not on a Sunday.

Bye.

Oh yeah, next week’s review is one of those is it really in London things. I am going to hate myself on the journey next Sunday.

So I clicked publish and it asked me to verify if Andrew is a nonce. How do I do that? Refreshing the page worked. Weird.