Sunday Roast Club

This time, our voyage in search of glorious roasty goodness was a bit more troublesome. The original plan was the Red Lion, one of the UAB pubs up in the Jewellery Quarter and one that comes well recommended as to their Sunday dinners. Well, maybe the dinners are nice, but it seems that booking is harder than it looks; we sent a booking request by email and never heard back, and rang a couple of times in the week and never got the phone answered, so on a windy and wet Sunday we decided to just take a chance and drop in unannounced. And, in their defence, they tried to be helpful, tried to find us a table… and failed. All full up. This was doubly disappointing since they were well-provided with wall art of mutant dead celebrities, which we’d decided was obviously fully on-brand after last time’s trip to the Lord Clifden.

No mutant dead celebrities for us. Out into the rain it is.

1000 Trades was the next port of call; they have cacti on some of the tables, you know. Not that we could tell since all the tables were full. Back out into the weather.

By this time at least half of Team Sunday Roast Club were annoyed enough to kick a hole through a van Gogh painting, so we went into the Button Factory, which had the virtue of being near, as well as the virtue of having been Vertu (which their contactless payment machine still thinks they’re called). And suddenly things started looking up. They were helpful, keen, led us to a table, told us about the menu. This is all rather nice. Music fractionally too loud, perhaps, but this is hardly the worst thing that can happen, and the decor’s pretty neat all in all. We ordered a bottle of a particular favourite white wine, which turned out to be the house white, and a beer, and they didn’t bat an eyelid at that (which is encouraging; bar staff, don’t be judgy). All was right with the world.

some of the elite reviewing team think this is delicious

And then… well. The waitress was a bit pushy about getting us to order the cauliflower cheese (a £6 extra), and we went along with that, and settled for half a roast chicken with bread sauce (the bread sauce being the clincher; when did you last see bread sauce on a menu? Super rare, and so definitely worth a try), and pork belly.

A little while later, the roast beef and the bread-sauce-less roast chicken arrived. Hm.

Cue a small discussion amongst ourselves as to whether the order was actually beef, and by the time we’d decided that no, we’d changed around a few times but actually had settled on the pork and had got beef instead, it was too late and a bit churlish to complain, and hey ho, it was a difficult decision anyway so it was hardly a big imposition. And the beef looked pretty good, too; plenty of it, nice and pink. The bread sauce being missing was rather more a problem, though; I mean, it’s specifically mentioned on the menu. Asking for it got a couple of weird looks, as if we’d perhaps requested a diced elephant or a diamond bracelet or something equally outlandish. It arrived, eventually. No cranberry sauce, either, even after asking, which was… surprising. And we had to pinch a pepper mill from another table. On the other hand, wholegrain mustard and horseradish with the beef was a pleasant offering. Enough of condiments, for now.

We did have ample opportunity to watch them cooking, though, which is nice — an open kitchen, on view, is a good touch in a restaurant. None of that “what the eye doesn’t see the chef gets away with” stuff. A point for that. And they have one really tall chef. Like, we think maybe he must have been standing on a box or something. Nice one, really tall chef.

Here, a point must be brought up. Call us hide-bound traditionalists, but let the word go throughout the land: Yorkshire puddings go with beef. They do not go with everything. Did we miss a meeting or something? Did the restauranteurs of the world just decide “roasts = Yorkshires”? No! You don’t need to put one with every Sunday dinner, really you don’t. Especially ones as huge as these; now, it seems ill-tempered to complain about getting too much food, but if you’re going to do a substantial dinner and then add a huge Yorkshire cloud to it as well, it behooves you to at least supply bigger plates. At least they weren’t bowls.

The potatoes and parsnips were a little oily, perhaps, and the “green medley” wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but the extra gravy helped.

All in all… an OK experience. Not one to write home about, really, but roast and good wine and good company is what Sundays are about.

I shall spare you, gentle reader, the half-hour in-depth discussion about whether the scoring system (which is now enshrined by having been used twice) allows half marks and just say: it doesn’t, and so The Button Factory score sixteen really tall chefs out of a total of twenty five.

Ambience
★★★★☆
Value for money
★★★☆☆
Taste
★★★☆☆
Service
★★★☆☆
Variety
★★★☆☆
16/25

PS. On our way out they started cleaning off the tables, and in doing so seemingly took the time to build a little shrine to our presence. This elevating us to godhood is good behaviour on the part of restaurants and we would like to see more of it. Keep it up.

Part the first

In which a plan is conceived

“Hashtag Sunday roast club?”
“You mean, go out, have a roast dinner in a restaurant somewhere, come up with a convoluted scoring system, and write a short essay of at best minimal relevance to the subject at hand while bringing up a bunch of personal hobby horses and, in extremis, mention whether the meat was OK?”
“Hashtag Sunday roast club!”
“Sold. Let’s book @TheLordClifden.”

Part the second

In which a convoluted scoring system is worked out and, in extremis, comments on whether the meat was OK are to be found

You can’t book the Lord Clifden Sunday lunchtimes, it turns out. Just drop by, they said. It’ll probably be OK. And it was. Minor kerfuffle around them having a front door with a sign saying “Open” and yet being locked put aside for a moment, the Lord Clifden is pretty famous around the Jewellery Quarter and the rest of the city for (a) having good food (b) and good beer (c) and good everything else, which is encouraging. Also, you get to ride the tram to get there, which probably requires a tram selfie, yes it does.

Delightful welcome, too; the place is busy but not too busy at half one on a Sunday, which means that it avoids the whole empty restaurant thing but you can still get a seat, and interesting mango-flavoured beer. They’re super fast, too: straight up to the bar, glass of this, pint of that, and a choice between half a roast chicken, braised Welsh lamb shoulder, roast topside of beef, or slow-cooked pork belly for the Sunday roast section, all with season(al) vegetables, Yorkshire pudding, mash(ed) potato, crispy roasters, and homemade red wine and rosemary gravy. (More on the gravy shortly.) Thirteen quid, which is pretty lucky in our collective opinion, especially when there’s a picture of a zombie Marilyn Monroe behind the bar. (Ah, Hallowe’en, how tacky and yet delightful thou art.)

The zombie head of Marilyn Monroe hangs above the bar in the Lord Clifden

It arrived alarmingly quickly too, unless we were just lost in conversation, and importantly hadn’t got that way by being microwaved, which means that the LC are confident enough that they’ll have people in that they cook the meals in the expectation thereof. This speaks well of the place in itself. The food lives up to it, too: excellently-done lamb which fell apart, great beef, lots of vegetables (no “and two veg” here). Sauces brought to the table without asking, and decent sauces, too: horseradish for the beef, mustard, and so on; everything you’d need, including decent ground peppercorns and not black dust in a pot with a P on the top that was last filled in 1988. Dinner’s in a bowl, mind you, for which you get a Suspicious Look. Bowls are not for roasts. But the food, bowl aside, was good stuff; well-cooked, tasty, well-varied, provided quickly, hot, not pricey. There was football on the telly, which was a bit loud, the gravy was a little bit thin, and underneath the meat there was Hidden Mash (is this a thing now? This should not, we feel, be a thing) but these are the minorest of minor cavils at best.

The scoring system is somewhat open to challenge as this goes on (it’s hard to judge the first place, especially when one hasn’t eaten a roast dinner not made by one’s mother for about five years), but for now, that’s 23 zombie Marilyn Monroe heads out of a total of 25 zombie Marilyn Monroe heads for @theLordClifden. Worth a visit.

Part the third