Roast Dinners in London

Remember when pubs also had pool tables? This week it was onto a proper 90’s boozer with a roast dinner at Simon’s Kitchen, hosted at The Flowerpot in Wood Street.

Well it was Tuesday morning before I even started writing this review due to the monstrosity of England playing at 1am in the morning – yes I did get some sleep, no it wasn’t enough, yes I did do some work afterwards, no it wasn’t enough.

Of course not quite as distasteful as FIFA overturning a red card due to political pressure.

Which is only slightly more tasteful than a dodgy kebab. And who’d have thunk it…

As according to the BBC, lamb doner kebabs from one of the major suppliers have just 10% lamb in. Can you believe it?

When I was at university (yes they actually let me go to university, believe it or not…and yes they kicked me out), rumours were that the Food Science department tested the donor kebabs and found pigeon amongst it.

Possibly not true but I decided to be safe and have a horse beef burger every night instead.

Until I discovered smoking weed, at which point I decided to be safe and have two burgers every night.

Flobbadob

I always get a bit scared of writing reviews when a chef has messaged me to try to get me in for a review (I always pay) – the last time this happened, I happened to jokingly complain about being charged for extra gravy (charge was not mentioned, nor on the menu) and then received a rant about how I don’t work in the industry and don’t understand how tough things are, yadda yadda.

I’m probably not hurting anyone’s feelings when I give a 4/10 to a chain pub employing agency chefs to knock out bang average roasts.

But when a chef personally messages me…scary.

Also scary (to a wannabe hipster though I’m really not at all that hip) is The Flowerpot.

It has a pool table.

It has fruit machines (albeit on a screen which is completely new to me…the last time I went in a Wetherspoons the fruit machine had a lever to pull).

It has England flags, know what I mean.

It has stools which desperately need a bit of love.

It has…a traffic light on the wall. Eh?

Oh but they had Space Raiders for sale, know what I mean. Oh and you can have your party here:

Ickle-kickle

One did feel a tad out of place, know what I mean, in The Flowerpot – it just isn’t the sort of pub I go in, now that it isn’t the 1990’s any more, and alas is the kind of pub most struggling with the 2020’s – when people talk about hospitality struggling, this is the kind of pub I have in mind. Not the chain pubs of companies on the stock market marketing their 4/10 roast dinners cooked the day before as if they are Michelin Star, but local boozers like The Flowerpot.

There is a danger I could go down the snooty route in this review, and may well do without intending to.

If you are of the hipster variety you could even consider going to The Flowerpot in the same ironic kind of way that you might use a typewriter just to pretend you are in the decade of Sepp Blatter’s corruption instead of Gianni Infantino’s corruption.

It might have felt like I’d stepped into the wrong pub, but the welcome was warm, and they had a Tiny Rebel beer on draught, and people seemed to be having a good time on the tables nearby. Sure it wasn’t Clapton Craft kind of beer selection, and you could get Foster’s – but also there are pubs with a worse selection, that serve 4/10 roast dinners.

To book, you had to text the number on Instagram to book a table and order a roast dinner – the choices were beef, pork belly, chicken or puy lentil and mushroom puff pastry roll – all priced at just £15.00. Maybe got you interested now. Well, if you live in the area, I might have. Or maybe you are a hipster living in south-west Lon…nah maybe not.

I went for the chicken. At £15.00. In 2026.

Flobbadob

Our roasts arrived 10 minutes after we’d popped to the shed in the garden, to advise of our arrival, and once we had poured our respective gravy on, looked as the below:

Starting with the cabbage which was alright, there was a bit of a crunch to it but otherwise could perhaps have at least used some seasoning.

Tenderstem broccoli is always welcome on a roast dinner, a fairly rare sight given most pubs just go for the cheapest vegetables – perhaps tasted quite watery and the tips were yellowing, but still a refreshing change from forever receiving carrots.

Probably the carrot was in the mashed ball – we thought also butternut squash and maybe swede, and this was actually pretty excellent, this had a bit more seasoning and I assume some butter, it was full of flavour.

The roast potatoes were actually pretty good too. You could tell very much that they were freshly made – soft and fluffy inside, one or two sides were crispy though mostly they hadn’t got there yet.

Weeeeeeeeeeed

The Yorkshire pudding was also pretty decent, freshly cooked and reasonably fluffy, along with being a size I could actually eat.

The chicken was a tale of two halves – the breast was dry. There is no sugar-coating it.

Yet the thigh was juicy and as succulent as you can get it – nicely seasoned too.

My accomplice had the beef, which was hearty and flavoursome if a tad overdone.

Finally, the gravy – I was impressed that in such a small operation in the hut of a pub, we each had a different gravy. Definitely it was thinner than I would prefer – the water off the broccoli didn’t help, but you could taste the chicken juices and it was a pretty damn good crack at a homemade gravy.

The Flowerpot. Men.

Both myself and my accomplice concluded that this was a mum-style roast, in a dad-style pub.

Whilst it isn’t a life-changing roast dinner, it was freshly cooked and more went right than otherwise.

Sure, the chicken breast was dry and some of the veg could have been a bit more interesting/seasoned/flavoured – but the chicken thigh was really juicy, the squash/carrot/swede (ish) thing was really flavoursome and the roasties/gravy pretty good too.

My score is a healthy 7.31 and my accomplice’s score is a 7.50.

If you are reading from the Walthamstow ish area, I reckon it’s worth a crack if you want an affordable roast dinner (at just £15.00, which is insane, and will likely be right near the top of my new “best value” roasts page when it updates, though also it needs a better algorithm so forgive me if the order changes a bit) – and hell, if you are too achingly hip for a pub that sells Foster’s, there are hipster places to go for a beer across the road, after having a roast dinner.

Hang on.

Infantino is on the phone…

My rating of 7.31 out of 10 has been overturned…and Infantino advises that the score has been changed under article 127.58a, and is now a 99 out of 10. Facking ‘ell geeza, know what I mean.

No plan for this coming Sunday’s roast dinner. Heck there’s not even a plan for watching the game yet.

Gosh even Blatter thinks this is corrupt. Babap Ickle Weed.