WORTH A DETOUR- LONDON: Tom Kerridge’s Butcher’s Tap & Grill (“BT&G”)
By Angela Zaher (@angela_zaher)
A Sunday Roast is a British institution. As iconic as high tea but way more meaningful. Make sure you carve out (pun intended) time in your itinerary to indulge in a long, hearty meal on Sunday involving a big piece of meat, potatoes and veg. That’s it. The food part is really simple- meat, potatoes and veg (a yorkshire pudding if you’re lucky). But food is not the centrepiece of a Sunday Roast, the company is. It’s the time that you invest in friends and family, an occasion when you down tools, hopefully down your mobile phones too and simply talk to each other.
The best place to have a Sunday Roast is at home. At home, you can really take your time, chat as the meat cooks in the oven, even go out for a walk maybe to build up the appetite for the biggest meal of the day, the whole week most likely. But if London is not your home, then the second best place to have it is in a pub. As simple as this meal is, it has to be done properly, by someone who knows about butchery, knows about keeping meat juicy and tender, knows about getting the best flavour out of potatoes and vegetables. Celebrity chef Tom Kerridge knows about all these things, and more. He made Michelin history when his The Hand and Flowers in Marlow was the first pub to receive the accolade of two Michelin stars. Now, he has a pub in Chelsea- a scenic ten minute walk from Sloane Square tube station along the shops of the King’s Road- which can provide you with an excellent Sunday Roast. Here, the very able kitchen crew (affectionately referred to as Tom’s Pirates) do all the prepping and cooking and your sole responsibility is to bring the best company so that you and your gang can sit back and enjoy a proper Sunday Roast.
My gang consisted of my husband and two teenage boys. I have learnt recently that bringing a teenager on a restaurant review is a very good thing. They have even more exacting standards: if they’re not enjoying it, they’re going to make sure no one else enjoys it either. Plus, they have a whole other refreshing way of looking at things- when I recently came across a pizzeria that was advertising a new “Aperol infused dough”, I groaned. My teenager however said “wow! That sounds really creative”.
I am delighted to report that we were all happy at BT&G. More than happy really, we were charmed and smitten. The pub is welcoming, uplifting and homely. It’s somewhere you’ld comfortably while away a Sunday- there’s even a tv on in the background, just like at home, in case you need to keep up with the sport that’s inevitably on.
The Sunday Roast is served in a large yorkshire pudding with a generous pot of robust and flavourful gravy. It looks so inviting and tastes as good as it looks. We also had a selection of kebabs off the charcoal grill- large, choice cuts of lamb, beef, chicken and pork, each served with its own dip, each a hit though the chicken will be the one that we’ll all be dreaming about as we go off to sleep tonight. Sides of harissa hispi cabbage and Korean bbq aubergine were terrific but my god, those roast potatoes. Perfect roast potatoes are a holy grail, you may spend your whole life trying to perfect them at home. They’re ahead of you at BT&G- unbelievably crunchy, not a smidgen of grease and as fluffy as the fluffiest pillow on the inside. I was tempted to smuggle some home in my pockets to study under the microscope- but they were all gone in the blink of an eye.
If you are in London on a Sunday and want an authentic taste of what Sunday Roast looks, smells, tastes and feels like, nip down one street away from the King’s Road and find your perfect roast at BT&G.
Angela Zaher is a freelance food writer based in London. Her articles have been published in The Evening Standard, Delicious, Good Housekeeping and The Brussels Times. She writes regular restaurant reviews for luxury lifestyle magazine, Time & Leisure. She is on the Committee of the Guild of Food Writers. Find her on instagram @angela_zaher.
