The Sunday Roast

The Sunday Roast is a venerable English tradition I had no idea existed until my wife - who is Irish, NOT English - and child and I were in London and she told us we were going for a Sunday roast. Not just any Sunday roast! We were going to the Holly Bush Tavern, where Emma Thompson was famously spotted drunkenly cavorting outside of after “a couple of hours drinking wine with a female friend.”

(Note: Wikipedia reports that the Sunday roast “was ranked second in a list of things people love about Britain,” probably after the Beatles and colonialism.)

So the idea is you decamp to a pub on a Sunday afternoon and drink ale and/or spirits and eat a huge motherfucking lunch, like with a big meat and vegetables and Yorkshire pudding, which isn’t pudding at all but kind of like a bread thing that looks like a huge failed muffin idk. You wash all this down with gallons of alcohol and then stumble out like Emma Thompson. I loved it! The pub was bright and convivial and everyone was so friendly when I went to the bar and they were impressed an American dolt was ordering Guinness instead of, I guess, Coors Light.

So when I heard that newish British pub Dingles - 333 Fulton, cross street Franklin - was putting on a Sunday roast, I had to book it for us. Guess what? It was very hard! Many many people want Sunday roast at Dingles! I had to book it like a month in advance.

Then the appointed day arrived.

Dingles is in the back of the building - the building being a hotel - and is very dark. There are no windows but hey who needs windows. We got our Sunday roast on.

Yikes, sorry if you’re vegetarian, that turned out grosser than expected. Anyway in this photo you can see the roast beast and some kind of burnt cabbage thing and some carrots and some roast potatoes. The potatoes and the meat were great, especially slathered in that gravy you can see at the top. The cabbage was fine. I don’t love cooked carrots but that’s a me thing, not a Dingles thing. The Guinness was absolutely A+++, will do business again.

It was good! The food was good and the service was good but it was just, I don’t know, missing something. It didn’t feel like a big raucous gathering of friends and neighbors, it felt like going to a really nice restaurant on a Sunday. There were no lager louts or old men singing, both of which I have observed and enjoyed in actual English pubs. I know that Dingles can’t do anything about that, what with the no windows and the fact that my Sunday roast cost well north of $35.

But that’s the reality right? San Francisco is so fucking expensive and the only way to get that convivial experience is probably a sports bar where they put out hot dogs for all the regulars on an NFL Sunday. I mean, the Sunday sirloin of beef at the Holly Bush is 28 pounds, which is like $37, so same diff.

The good news is as we were walking to Anina for a post-roast drink, we spotted Ennui Dog, the dog who sighs deeply for all of us.

Ennui Dog is us and we are Ennui Dog.