Roast Dinners in London

Hello boys! Lord Gravy reporting for duty, this time at The Old Red Lion in Kennington.

Maybe don’t tell Ofcom about that poster, otherwise they’ll be forcing me to add age verification or fining me 5% of Roast Dinner in London’s revenue, which is 5% of fuck all but hey that’ll teach the internet to stop being dangerous to children. SAVE ARE KIDS.

Unless you want to be my first paid subscriber on Substack?

Speaking of dangers to children.

Obviously I changed the HTML myself, but wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world where sexual abusers and war criminals didn’t get to strut the world stage, and actually got called out by our media. And heck, maybe went to jail for their crimes.

I mean, these are both proven facts, I haven’t even had to go down the Epstein conspiracy route, though you can question why we’ve gone from “going to sanction the hell out of Putin” to “Zelensky needs to make a deal”, and what exactly was said to Agent Krasnov in the limo.

It stinks, doesn’t it?

Whew! Putin would like Trump to pay attention to this matter! 🤣

— Toks Nilhaw 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇨🇦🇲🇽🇬🇱🇵🇦 (@toksnilhaw.bsky.social) 2025-08-17T12:11:17.065Z

Get The Fuck Out Of Ukraine

Meanwhile, I continue my struggle to highlight the inequality of roast potatoes in London, and the unfairness of waiting 6 weeks for a table at Blacklock.

This week I headed to a ChatGPT recommendation, The OId Red Lion which is a gloriously aged pub on Kennington Park Road.

Yeah I know it could be hallucinating making shit up, but the others on the list were all pretty good though I’d been to them, and the gravy looked thick on Google Maps, so why not.

They actually had a fairly interesting beer choice, with a session IPA from Supercute, a pineapple IPA from…don’t remember, and also a couple more pale ales. Plus there was a garden out the back, not excessively in the sunshine (alas for me), and inside was like a proper old pub, even with those “mind your head” signs as you travel between both bars, for back in the 1800’s when only those under 130cm were allowed in pubs.

Roast dinners were cheap as well, though this isn’t always a good sign.

Options were rosemary and lemon half chicken at £18.50, rump of beef at £19.75, pork loin at £18.50 or a butternut squash, sweet potato and spinach wellington at £15.50.

Yep, actually under £20.00. Up yours, Biden. I went for the chicken at £18.50, on advice from the waiter.

This may or may not have been the waiter. Memory is fucked.

Get The Fuck Out Of Gaza

Our roasts took around 15 or so minutes to arrive – my glass of wine longer, though it tasted like it was from Tesco Express and that’s further away than the kitchen is, I guess.

Yeah there’s some suspiciously grey stuff going on, but we’ll start with the carrots which is exactly how it goes around here.

So the carrots were pleasant, soft and roasted – not much else I can say.

The greens came in the form of cabbage and leeks, but were a little crunchy and undercooked, especially the leeks.

Then we should tackle the grey sludge. You may be expecting this to be stuffing, as were we, but it tasted closer to parsnip, but with sage and in sludge form.

Oh god this is hard work. Shall we have a break and maybe watch an inspiring conversation between Bonnie Blue and Ibiza Final Boss?

@bonnieblue

Bonnie Blue meeting Ibiza Final Boss

♬ original sound – Bonnie Blue

Please tell me he’s got an alt coin I can invest in.

Get The Fuck Out Of Georgia

Roast potatoes?

Well they weren’t as bad as last week’s, but they were somewhat on the stale side of the spectrum. There was a bit of thyme so a fraction of a point for that, and they were quite soft. Yeah…whatever.

But then the weirdly grey, verging on green yorkie. What was that about?

It was kind of structured like an Aunt Bessie but I do think more likely it was cooked from scractch. The bottom was actually quite soft, if not soggy so actually worked quite nicely with the chicken…but why the grey? Oh, and it was notably cold.

The chicken itself was actually good, the breast plump and moist, no dryness going on – and the leg part was juicy too. Thank you for paying attention to this matter.

Along with advertised flavour of rosemary and lemon being detactable, which isn’t always the case, this was actually enjoyable.

My accomplice had the beef, and said it was OK. Not chewy but a bit dry. The chicken was easily the better choice.

Well, you’ve made it to roast dinner final boss, the gravy and this wasn’t at all boss – despite being thick. It was Bisto. Or some other granules, it left that yacky salty taste to my tongue for hours. But at least it was thick gravy.

The Old Red Lion

So a bit of a mixed bag from The Old Red Lion, and I’ll stick to using AI to do my software engineering job for me, instead of choosing where to eat. Sorry, I mean augmenting my abilities as a software engineer. My boss does read this.

Some bits were good. Well, the chicken was really good – and I appreciate having a choice of beers.

The gravy was a bit yacky due to the saltiness and assumed granules, the roasties a bit stale, the yorkie kind of grey and what was that sludge about?

As one of my accomplices said, it was “functional”, though I think some of the functions were a bit lacking. There’s quite a bit on my loathing list, yet I didn’t feel like I loathed it as a whole as much as last week’s, for example.

Scores from my accomplices were a 7.00 from my fellow chicken-eater, and a 6.40 from my regular accomplice eating the beef.

My score is a lowly 6.28 out of 10. Good pub though, and definitely worth popping in for a beer or three.

Next Sunday I have a flight in the afternoon, but I reckon I’ll have time for a roast dinner somewhere first…hopefully!

Well at least there is some justice in this world.