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.
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.
Sunday Roast Club 