Roast

As always when I have something to do in London, I try and cram in lunch or dinner somewhere. This time I was off to Sweeney Todd, so 12pm lunch was pushing things. Would we really want to eat at 12pm? I could always have a salad I thought, but going to Roast I doubted that very much. Luckily the Roast menu got my gastric juices flowing, and the Beef Wellington with buttered carrots and perfect roasties were all fantastic. Three of us had Beef Wellington and my wife had the Pork Belly – always a great dish at Roast – and we were all impressed. The staff even brought out a lovely Birthday surprise for my Mum, so extra Brownie points went to me (and them). I will visit again for sure, although next time I think Roast needs my undivided attention.

went for my birthday in september after hearing raving reviews from my wife and others.

thoroughly disappointed.

To begin, we arrived at 7.30 on a Thursday and were told that the days special, suckling pork, which I was looking forward to was already finished along with two other mains. Starters were boring and uneventful: some buffalo mozzarella (in itself quite good quality) lacked any kind of dressing (i.e. a bit of good olive oil perhaps?) and looked a picture of biblical desolation amidst four quarters of unpeeled figs. The other starters were so uneventful I can't even remember them. No to the mains: one of us had roast pork. It was overcooked, dry, and the apple sauce seemed sourced from McDonald's apple pie; my filet was both overcooked on the outside and undercooked on the inside (I had asked for medium done) as well as being oversalted. At this point we needed to remind ourselves of the restaurant's name and the fact that they ‘specialise’ in meat. ahem.

Atmosphere was amazing if you're the kind of person who enjoys the company of testosterone-heavy bankers who roll over London Bridge in droves to this establishment to spend corporate cash. Extremely loud but devoid of any good atmosphere, which is in itself an achievement, surely.

The only redeeming feature was the service: attentive, but unintrusive and friendly.

Verdict: if you're at borough market during the day join the queue of tourists and office louts for the roast takeaways which are good value and frankly tastier than a sit down meal upstairs. If you want quality meat go to Hawksmoor et al.

Roast on a Monday lunch in January – not quite the same as dinner on a Sunday atmos wise, approx 30 or so dinners all herded up to the raised part of the room – we bagged a table by the far window with view over the railway line (not so good) and St Pauls(so good). By night you get the beauty of SP without Network Rail's finest so go when it is dark. 6 quid for a Tanquery and Tonic as a pre-prandial seemed par for the course given the view.

Foodwise things aren't what they were a couple of years ago – the set menu at £28 for 3 course was decent value though, starter of Whitebait had however been cooked in old oil and the batter was more orange then light golden and the fish had seen better days. Maincourse of chicken and chorizo redemmed although £4.50 for 6 roasties on the side was a kick in the king edwards. Desert of Apple Crumble and vanilla ice excelled. Booze by the carafe was a welcome change (thank you Arbutus) although £16 for a 500ml carafe of so so Fiano was a a little strong for an average wine and this was the second cheapest (Homer Simpson's favourite choice)

Overall still one for the tourist and the food quality has suffered in light of all the fresh ingredients underneath but still a decent place for a bite – just come in the dark.

I went along to Roast to look at the venue for a dinner for a restaurant / hotel group I belong to. It was a stunning sunny day in the market and the hustle and bustle made me much more glad I was eating at the peacefull yet vibrant Roast for lunch. While I sipped my ever so good soya latte waiting for my colleaugue to arrive I watched many shoppers buying up the local wares from the market and witnessed sunny shoppers eating amazing chorizo and rocket baps while wandering around the fascinating streets.

The staff at the restaurant are very attentive and were very good at ensuring I was fine and comfortable as I waited. My colleaugue finally arrived and we were shown to our table and greeted with a chilled glass of bubbly. This went down very well on this sunny day.

We didnt have starters but dived right into the main courses and so glad we did as the portions were pretty large. I had the pigs cheeks with a parsnip mash and we orderd some extra crispy roast potatoes and curly kale to go with the meal. My colleague had a starter made larger for his meal and they accomodated perefctly for this.

The pigs cheeks melted in my mouth and went exceptionally well with the mash. The roast potatoes were a little dissapointing and not as crispy on the outside and or as fluffy in the centre as I would have liked and not very hot but the kale was amazing and something I havnt had for a while now. Why we dont eat more of that vegetable I now wonder!

We had a lovely glass of wine with our meal and the service yet again was very good, I would say a little over attentive maybe. We rounded the meal off with a great espresso and paid the bill. I will be booking the venue for sure and in the meantime I am going back this week for a dinner for a friends birthday. Hoping it will be just as good!

I would recommend this restaurant if you love British fare and local sourcing.

Borough Market could be regarded as one of those dressed up areas of London’s street trading, far removed from more dullsville, mediocre East End market trade, with knock-down priced goods and bargain purchases. On first appearance this may not be immediately noticeable, but wander the stalls and soak in the atmosphere and you will find an opulent emporium of goods that are testament to a multitude of cultures. I took my Pa out for his birthday and had decided on Roast a few weeks earlier. This was my third visit; the previous two both being relishable affairs, so it was with some enthusiasm that I entered the lift and was elevated to the restaurant.

The room design is impressive, remarkable for a space which once probably acted as upstairs storage for fruit and veg and folded stalls; over-ripe and dripping pulp into their wooden crates and causing quite a pong one would imagine. Now, from one side of the room, you can see below to the country cheese and organic veg stalls, assemblies of Turkish delights and fresh soup pots, grasses, grains and caryopsis all lined up in higgledy-piggledy formations under the arches. From the dining rooms other side there are train arches with South Eastern trains zipping along, an image you’ve come to expect from the area’s logistics to London Bridge. The design, to continue, is successful in bringing light into the tall room and high-reaching windows presents various activity and events from the bustling hullabaloo below.

The menu is surprisingly brisk, which is reassuring as it shows faith and ability in the dishes available. And there are some punchy British choices, for instance the chicken livers on toast with smoked streaky bacon (£8.50) were divine, the liver and sauce melting into the toast like a sapid sponge, and my ox tongue with Butcher’s sauce and mashed potatoes (£16.50) was a success, soft to cut and robust in flavour. The Butcher’s sauce neatly accompanying the tongue. There’s also a lunch offering for three-courses for £20 that I’ve tasted before and includes the likes of scallops and pork belly, well worth taking advantage of.

We visited on a Wednesday evening and the Daily Special was roast rib of Welsh Black beef with Yorkshire pudding, horseradish and Colman’s English mustard (£28.00). Pa picked the special along with two side dishes to complete his roast dinner: buttered asparagus and Jersey royals (£6.00) and young spinach leaves with pine nuts, lemon and olive oil (£5.00). The beef was hefty, covering half the plate. Fatty deposits were stringy though and remained piled on the plate at the end to an unsatisfying result. And come on, who pays £39 for a roast dinner? Me, that’s who. Mug.

My side of grilled field mushrooms with garlic butter (£4.50) was disappointing with the three large mushrooms sodden with too much acerbic butter. It was surely enough to melt the eyeballs of any vampire, let alone keep it away. And the breath, I must have been giving of emissions like a sweaty Yoga teachers thong. Luckily I could mask this with regular gulps of plonk from a rich and serious wine list. We had a pleasant little find in the shape of an English Pinot Noir from Chapel Down in Tenterden, Kent, which is down the road from where I come from. Big up Kent! Let’s here it for a cheeky little English wine. Its colour is similar to a rose – much lighter complexion than most reds – holding smells of strawberries and summer fruits. There’s an offensive markup price however at £31 a bottle. The following weekend on the Chapel Down website, I ordered a case of six for £70 (including delivery costs).

Filled to the brim from meaty richness, dessert seemed unlikely, an impossible tackle from a stomach lining poisoned by my greed and stretched to its very limits. I had had my fill and lubed my lining with a silky plonk, yet continued my gormandizing with a tasty toffee apple sundae (£6.50) accompanied by a glass of Glenfiddich Caoran (12 year old) whisky (£12.00). Jesus on a bendy bus it had some punch! I was back in the game. Pa’s Montgomery’s Cheddar platter (£8.50) – his absolute favourite cheese, by James Montgomery & Steve Bridges at Manor Farm, and assumingly sourced from the marvelous Neal’s Yard across the road – came with a glass of Malbec 2007, Ruca Malen (£8.50) and with a single birthday candle burning away, something which pleased the old man greatly. And so we capped off a hoggish and voracious evening, finally sticking the bill straight onto my credit card. Ouch!

I have visted Roast on severaly occassion, when it first opened, for of course Sunday Lunch, well thats why its call Roast right?! Then for quick lunches, drinks and dinner
There is a lift up to the restaurant, from brough market into the restaurant only then to be greeted but 3 receptionists

The setting is one of kind, over brough market, with glass from floor to ceiling and a dome shaped glass roof, its really light and airy, also it has a great a bar area with a piano who play jazz

So now I have built up the setting I was really diapointed to say that the food is average, and £30 per head is quiet a bit with no veg, that I fnd very cheeky, its great for a meeting place but I would rush to order

yes there are still restaurants in london serving steak and chips for £30 where the chips are half cooked from frozen and i nearly lost my teeth chewing through the meat. somebody is cutting some corners to increase margins here…
what is worse is when i pointed thisout as to just how awful the food is by email i got an immediate acknowledgement with a promise of follow up then nothing – i guess that is tacit acceptance that you can fool most of the people most of the time but you cant fool all of them all of the time…
if you want to see best of british done properly get back in a cab over the river for the short ride to mark hix in cowcross st smithfield…

Roast. Roast and more Roast. They've sure got the name right. If there was one word I would use to describe the type of cuisine on offer it would be ‘Roast’. It was a friend's birthday last night and for a (yet another) special treat, we went to the restaurant above Borough Market in London Bridge, famous for its (you guessed it) roast meats and rich accompaniments. This is not one to visit if you are trying to eat healthily or on a budget. It's indulgence in all sorts of ways.

The restaurant is beautiful; it was stylishly lit and with a stunning semi-circular window (the retained portico of an old flower market); there was an open kitchen where you could see the kitchen staff plating up salads and sauces (my friend did ask if one of them was the headchef to which we all replied, no dear, he/she will be doing much more important things in the back); a vault for expensive wine and a swish shiny bar cutting off the casual area with a live piano from the bistro style restaurant.

The meat was delicious, especially the steak, which unsurprisingly enough was the most expensive thing on the menu. It was cooked medium and presented stylishly on a wooden board with a novelty miniature pan of peppercorn sauce. I didn't order it so cannot give a full account. All I was allowed was a tiny slither. Look at the photo to the left though and you can make up your own mind. It looked pretty damn good to me. Instead I ordered the Beef Wellington and it was great, but didn't leave me speechless. The meat was pink and soft and the sauce was rich and winey, but the pastry wasn't crispy enough and the mushroom pate was a little overpowering. It was also meant to come with braised red cabbage which was another reason why I ordered it, but the restaurant had run out, very unimpressive considering the £28 price tag. I was offered root mash as an alternative which I accepted a bit grumpily only to find that the sidedish was left off our order when the rest of the food was bought out. The other side dishes were pleasing, especially the sprouts with bacon and stuffing, a true taste of Christmas. The wine was delicious, but it was £17 and all we got was a 500ml carafe. I would happily have paid that for a full bottle, but two-thirds? A bit much.

The waitress was friendly and did some good selling. She uptalked all of the specials and tried her very hardest to get us to buy doubles of everything. On both cases she didn't persuade us, at £9 per G&T, one was more than enough. Overall the service was a little slow. Our table was constantly being buzzed around by waiters, waitresses and bar men but for all the show of being busy, not a lot of waitering happened. For this sort of money I expected a quicker and more responsive service. Though they recovered some points when we told them it was one of our parties birthdays and a plate of ice cream with a candle, a homemade brandy snap and ‘happy birthday Kate’ written in chocolate sauce turned up.

Now to the entertainment. In the bar area was a singer with accompanying pianist. She played some great, cheesey tunes (a lot of Aleisha Keys, Mariah Carey) and had a fantastic voice but she was a little overwhelming. Everyone had a little giggle when she started the first chorus of Empire State of Mind and at ‘New York’ (not Newport..), a third of the restaurant (mostly those under 30) started to sing along. But the over-loud volume did get in the way of us having a deep and meaningful over dinner.

Overall, I had an ace experience and I went home very full and fairly satisfied. My final issue with Roast is that whilst stuffing myself with great produce I easily forgot where I was. I was sitting and eating above one of the most iconic food markets in the country. Why wasn't I being reminded of it? It wasn't mentioned in any of the menus, there were no pictures on the wall, it was a real undersell of the resources right on their doorstep. If it was my restaurant, I would have been buying the beef from the beef stall in the market, the wine from the wine stall in the market, the..you, get the picture. Maybe they did? They just didn't bother to let the patrons know.

We recently visted Roast for Sunday lunch. Service was poor. Having ordered wine that was finished before the starters, we ordered a further bottle. Despite a long wait between courses, the additional bottle of wine had not arrived by the time we we were half-way through the main course. On being told about this our wiatress grimaced as if we had just told her that pig could fly. When it finally arrived (at the end of the main course) we were told that they had had to go to the cellar to get a bottle. Whee else? Although the food maybe from “the finest seasonal produce”, the results we experienced were bland. At £30 a head for lunch, perhaps we shouldn't have expected anything more (although better value isn't difficult to find in London on a Sunday). However, I can't speak for the entire cellar, but our choice of wine was overpriced – difficult for a £30 bottle. If you are going to Roast, go for the views and atmoshere (and even the jazz), but expect long delays and poor attitudes from the staff.

I love Roast. I've been 3 times now, twice for lunch and once for dinner, and the food never fails to please. If you are coming make sure to bring your appetite as the portions are huge and everything tastes great, though as the name suggests its suits the more carnivorous dinner with veggies somewhat hard done by. One minor gripe is that most dishes don't come with any vegetables etc so you'll need to get into side orders at additional cost, and its not the cheapest place anyway – expect to spend about £60-£70 a head depending on what you are drinking and how much. The clients are a real mix, turn up in your best suit or your jeans and you'll be treated equally well by the excellent staff. The room is great, really light and airy and you'll find yourself playing spot the celebrity through the series of pictures on the walls. Enjoy a stroll round Borough Market and down to the River pre or post lunch to aid the appetite or the digsetion and you'll have a thorougly excellent time.