The Sunday Roast Project
A shared hobby, an ambitious dog, and the thing about roast potatoes.
Every good project needs a methodology.
Ours is simple. We find a pub in Hampshire that does a Sunday roast. We go. We order the beef — always the beef, because consistency is the foundation of any serious comparative exercise. We eat. We discuss. We rank. We go home to a dog who has heard about the beef and has opinions about not having been offered any.
This is, as far as we are concerned, an excellent way to spend a Sunday.
How it started
For years, Sunday lunch was an event.
Two daughters, and — once one daughter acquired a fiancé with a particularly enthusiastic fondness for skirlie — a table that required actual planning. My wife’s Sunday roast was, and remains, a serious undertaking: the kind of meal that takes time and love, fills the house with the sort of smells that I wish could be bottled and sold, and enough leftovers that Otis, our dog, would spend the afternoon in a state of satiated stupor.
And then, as daughters tend to do, they left. The fiancé became a son-in-law — a good man, though one whose enthusiasm for skirlie is such that his arrival for Sunday lunch is preceded by a measurable decline in Hampshire’s oatmeal reserves — but the weekly gathering quietly became an occasional one. And cooking a full Sunday roast for two felt, if not exactly wrong, then slightly more than the occasion required.
So we went to a pub instead.
The roast was good. One of us said we should do this more often. The other agreed. Otis, who was under the table engaged in the early stages of a charm offensive aimed at the table next to us, expressed no objection.
A few Sundays later we were in a different pub. The roast was also good, but differently good, which raised the question of which was better, which required discussion, which required a ranking, which required, by implication, more data points.
And that was that. The Sunday Roast Project had begun, unnamed and unplanned, in the way that the best things tend to.
How we rate a Sunday roast
The beef is non-negotiable. This is the control variable. Unless there’s game on the menu, in which case the rules are just guidelines and we can always come back another week for the beef and well, you know… pheasant!
Everything else is assessed on its merits. The Yorkshire pudding, the gravy — pigs in blankets are always a plus point — and of course the vegetables, which have an unexpectedly large influence over the quality of the whole meal, either elevating it to delicious or dragging it down to uninspired.
And of course the roast potatoes.
I’ll come back to the roast potatoes shortly.
After the meal, we compare notes. Where does this one sit in the rankings? Better than the last? Better than the one before that? Is there a new entry in the top three?
We don’t always agree. This is one of the better features of the project. A shared hobby that produces genuine debate is considerably more entertaining than one that simply confirms what you already thought.
The roast potato problem
There is a problem at the heart of the Sunday Roast Project.
No pub we have visited has produced roast potatoes that come anywhere near my wife’s.
This is not sentiment, nor is it the bias of familiarity. This is an objective assessment based on extensive comparative research, conducted by someone who has now eaten roast potatoes in a meaningful number of establishments. Someone who invented Later Taters — the practice of eating leftover roast potatoes at room temperature with salt in front of the television — obviously knows what he is talking about. It remains one of the finest things a Sunday evening has to offer. The inescapable conclusion, therefore: the best roast potatoes in the area are available at home, made by the person sitting across the table from me, and we are out here paying other people to produce an inferior version of them.
She is aware of this. She finds it pleasing. It is, I should say, entirely unsurprising. I knew before the project began that no pub was going to get close. It is simply a fact, accepted without complaint, that the best roast potatoes in Hampshire are made at home. The search for second place continues.
The pubs are not without merit. Several have come close. None have arrived.
We continue the search anyway, mostly because going out together on a Sunday afternoon — with nowhere particular to be, no roster deciding otherwise, and a dog who considers himself an essential part of any expedition — turns out to be one of the better discoveries of this chapter of life.
Bringing your dog to the pub — the Otis method
Otis is our cockapoo. He is also, by his own assessment, a member of the dining party with an equal claim on anything that arrives at the table.
He is not correct about this. He is, however, extremely persuasive.
The technique varies depending on the establishment and the available angles of approach, but the core methodology — and this is something he has been refining over the years — involves positioning himself in a location where eye contact with at least one diner is unavoidable, and then applying a sustained expression that communicates that he has not eaten in some time, that the beef smells extraordinary, and that whatever quantity you were planning to leave on your plate would honestly be better in his mouth. On occasion, when the desired results are not forthcoming quickly enough, he licks his lips. Slowly. Just to be clear about his position.
The expression is, it should be acknowledged, very good. I find his communication skills both impressive and deeply inconvenient.
He usually gets a piece. Not just from me, I should say. From my wife, who maintains that she is unmoved by his campaign and then, invariably, slips him something under the table with the casual air of someone who has absolutely not just been telling me off for doing exactly that.
What it’s actually about
The beef is good. The Yorkshire puddings are usually fine. The gravy ranges from excellent to optimistic. The roast potatoes, as established, are fighting for a silver medal at best.
But the thing that makes the Sunday Roast Project worth doing — the thing that makes any regular shared ritual worth doing — isn’t really the roast. It’s the afternoon. The particular quality of time that has been set aside for no purpose other than to be spent together, in a comfortable dog-friendly pub, with a cockapoo under the table conquering the room one stare at a time, and nowhere else to be.
The kitchen table is quieter than it used to be on Sundays. No daughters, no skirlie emergencies, no Otis competing for scraps with people four times his height, and no son-in-law with designs on the Later Taters. Just the two of us, a ranking system, and a dog who has learned that patience and the right expression will eventually be rewarded with beef.
It’s a different Sunday to the ones we used to have. Without doubt, the best Sundays are still the ones when the girls and the son-in-law come home and the table fills up again and Hampshire once again begins to run low on oatmeal. But these ones are good too. Quietly, reliably, genuinely good.
The current standings
The rankings are ours and we’re keeping them. Partly because they will evolve as the project continues, and partly because recommending a pub is a responsibility that deserves its own article, with the full notes and the proper verdict and a clear assessment of where the roast potatoes sat in the broader context.
Those articles are coming. Otis will be mentioned in dispatches.
In the meantime, if you happen to know a dog-friendly pub that does something exceptional with a Sunday roast — and particularly with a roast potato — the project committee is accepting submissions.
The bar, it should be said, is high.
Have you found the perfect Sunday roast near you? It doesn’t have to be Hampshire, or even on the British Isles. Tell us in the comments — and whether the dog approved.
