Roast Dinners in London

From Santorini law of doing not a lot every day other than eating and drinking, back into Sadiq Khan’s Shakira law of having to go for a roast dinner on a Sunday, whilst swinging my hips. This week it was the turn of The Marksman in Bethnal Green.

Do you want to see a Gregg’s sausage roll?

Probably not.

Do you want to see a Greek sausage roll?

Also probably not, but bollocks to you.

Fine, it wouldn’t win the best sausage roll of the UK competition, but the pastry was flaky and the sausage actually tasted of sausage instead of greasy gym kit.

You know, I once came back from holiday – this was prior to the days of smartphones, and we joked at the aiport (Ibiza airport to add more context) that the world could have collapsed and we would have had no idea, so I went to find a newspaper in the shop, and the banking system was actually collapsing.

The Escalator Man

Look, folks, I can tell – you weren’t impressed. SAD! It wasn’t just a Greek sausage roll, okay? It was a tremendous Greek sausage pie. The best. People are talking about it. Everyone says so. Everyone that has been to that bakery in Santorini anyway.

VERY UNFAIR. But I know something you’ll love even more than beating up immigrants:

The longest. The greatest. The biglyist. People come from all over the world to ride it — believe me, it’s the best, biggest escalator in the world.

Or how about the deepest escalators. So deep you think you’re going to China. Unless you are going up, in which case you are going to heaven, especially if you have stopped more wars than you’ve read books, like the genius that is me.

Do you want to see one final escalator in action?

Ohhhh actually it’s not in action any more.

And there was me thinking nothing would happen in my week off, but apparently a radical leftist escalator nearly started a war.

On the bright side, at least Trump knows to stand on the right side of the escalator. Feel like I can now forgive him for the roughly 14 million deaths that are estimated to be caused by Trump/Musk cancelling funds for various health programmes in the global south, or whatever we are supposed to call countries with poor people that rich people may or may not have conquered a long time ago now.

Roast dinner?

The Escalated Man

So more often than not, I pick my roast dinner venues by random number generator, from my to-do list, but this time I decided to go to the one on there the longest, The Marksman.

It’s probably been on there since 2018 maybe?

The Marksman is a very food-orientated pub, the first to have been awarded the Michelin pub of the year award, their pies are talked about in hushed tones, and apparently their roast dinners are the bomb too – though I always like to have a sceptical mind when it comes to hyped places, even if the hype in this case happened before we had buses talking about sending £350m a week to the NHS, which has now clearly happened and everyone in the UK is super healthy thanks to the eradication of hospital waiting times that Brexit brought us.

By the way, whatever you do, don’t watch this video of Andrea Jenkyns singing at the Reform UK conference.

Jeez we are in for a lot of pain if Reform UK ever get into parliament.

The Harks Woman

So we were sat upstairs in the dining room, which was perfectly pleasant, busy (if a tad noisy) and fairly minimally decorated – though with some cute ceiling lamps which could be moved around on tracks, which I thought was nifty.

It was one of those places that encourages you to have two courses by hiding the price of one course, two courses being £38.00. For the sake of being able to compare to other places, I asked how much just the roast would be, which was £35.00, or so the waitress thought.

Options on the menu were beef rump…or for an extra £25.00 (between two) the beef wing rib. Believe it or not, I didn’t actually choose the most expensive option.

Roasts took around 20-30 minutes to arrive, it seemed a bit longer than normal, but a totally fine amount of time.

And then by time I dished it up, it looked like this:

The Roast Dinner Man

So starting with the carrots which were very soft, but otherwise pleasantly unremarkable.

Even softer was the puree, which was fluffily soft and a puree I could just about get down with – celeriac puree, quite a creamy feel.

And the cabbage was buttery, if still often quite crunchy in places.

Those Westminster escalators are good though, right? Do you have a favourite escalator? Add a comment at the bottom…once you’ve finished reading all the rest of this enthralling episode of Lord Gravy moans about roast potatoes.

The roast potatoes looked the part, and there were 7 between us to share, yet…yeah here it comes, they were a little chewy and dry. They looked like they had crispy sides, and sometimes there was a crisp, but then there was either a chewy or dry inside. I’ve had far worse, soooooo many times, but you’d also hope for far better at a venue that has a reputation for roast dinners.

That said, the other thing that is often fucked up is the Yorkshire pudding, but The Marksman more or less got this right. Perhaps a little dry to top, but it was freshly cooked, fairly eggy and soft to bottom. The best yorkie for quite a while.

The Larkin Out Man

The other thing you’d expect from The Marksman was the beef to be on point. It wasn’t.

Whilst pleasingly cooked rare, the beef itself was chewy. One slice was really chewy and really hard to cut, despite the performance of replacing our knives with sharper knives pre-roast. That slice was also rather flavoursome and had some smokiness. The other two slices were less chewy but also had less flavour – not helped by being smothered from laying on top of the celeriac puree. It wasn’t a disaster, but it didn’t meet hopes or expectations.

But then the gravy was really good. Quite thin, sure, but it seemed like lots of effort, stock, bones, yadda yadda had gone into it. One of the better gravies of 2025.

I’m not done yet.

Given that dessert was effectively £3 extra, and I’ve only put on 5kg of weight in the last month (might need to stop having holidays), the only correct option was to order dessert.

I had the baked cheesecake which felt really soft and airy, if nowhere near the beauty of the best baked cheesecake of my life – and could have done with a tiny bit more plum to top.

My accomplice had the brown butter and honey tart, which I thought was better than the cheesecake, as the topping was just gloriously oozy, and it was possibly the best thing I’ve had that tasted of honey for a while. But then again, that’s usually just honey-glazed carrots.

The Marksman

Well it was nice to go somewhere with a bit more proper restaurant vibes, even if The Marksman probably wants to be seen as still a proper pub.

The beer choice was actually half-decent too, I had a good pale ale from Deya (or is it DEYA?) which wasn’t Steady Rolling Man, I clocked a cask beer listed too, so maybe they can call themselves a proper pub, at least according to my father’s rules.

House wine was medium bodied and actually really nice too, perhaps more complexity than you’d expect from a house red. Plus the service was really on point, gentle, welcoming, always able to answer questions and nudge us towards dessert.

Not everything on the roast was great – the beef far too chewy, and the roast potatoes were chewy/dry – they both need some work, for my tastes.

Yet everything else was good. The vegetables were all interesting and with quality, especially the cabbage, the yorkie was soft and fresh, the gravy really good too.

Scores on the table for The Marksman were a 7.85 from my regular accomplice, and a 7.54 out of 10 from myself. Despite knowing the roasties and especially the beef really should have been better, we didn’t come away disappointed, and the experience was really enjoyable. It’s on the list to go back to Monday to Saturday. Maybe upgrade to the beef rib if you do go.

And then it was time to head down to the Mikkeller bar to drink £15.00 pints. I’m still on holiday, right? No roast next Sunday as, erm…I’m on holiday again. But maybe there will be a shit Algarve roast for Roast Dinners Around The World?

Either way, I will be back the week after – with a BBQ meat kinda place. Hmmm. Taking my vegan friend. Ummm.