Preparing for Sunday Roast in London

 We'll be going to London at the beginning of January and our first day there will be Sunday, so of course we'll need a Sunday roast.  We arrive early that morning (6:30 am) so have plenty of time to get ready.  Unfortunately Juan, Mandy and Louise don't land until 11 but we're hoping we can get to the Sunday Roast by 3 so the restaurant doesn't run out of lamb, like it did when we were there with Penny in 2018.  Americans think of Sunday dinner but in England it is Sunday lunch, and TimeOut says it is "An elemental meal, one that Londoners take incredibly seriously".

Whippet Inn Garden Space

Juan had made reservations at Blacklock but they notified him recently that they weren't doing Sunday Roast on New Year's Eve (probably preparing for a big bash instead...).  Now we're doing Sunday Roast at at a pub more local to the Kensal Rise AirBnB:  The Whippet Inn.  It offers "modern seasonal food, complimented by an excellent range of local and continental craft beer" (good!  I'll be able to get a Belgian ale) and it has a heated, all-weather garden space.  Below is their sample roasts menu:

R O A S T S

All our roasts are served with roast potatoes, glazed carrots, seasonal greens, a Yorkshire pudding & gravy.
Full Whippet Roast – trio of beef, pork, chicken with pork stuffing 23.5
Slow Roasted Lamb Shoulder (serves 2) 52

Roast Hampshire rolled pork belly, apple sauce 17.5

Roast Hereford rump of beef, horseradish 20

Roast chicken, pork stuffing Pumpkin & Chestnut 18.5
Pumpkin & Chestnut Wellington (v / vg on request) 17.5

Their dessert menu includes panna cotta, sticky toffee pudding and mango sorbet.  What's not to like!

In the meantime I'm perusing TimeOut London's article on The best Sunday roasts in London to find a spot for our second Sunday in London and to know what to look for that is typically British.  So far I have discovered that most Sunday Roasts are in pubs.  Pubs typically don't open till noon so they have all morning to prepare, in other words don't try to find an English Breakfast at a pub...  However, the Whippet Inn does have a Saturday Brunch (11-4) with a Full English (sausage, eggs, bacon, baked beans, mushroom, roasted tomato, hash browns, black pudding) and a Full vegetarian (sausage, eggs, spinach, baked beans, mushroom, roasted tomato, hash browns).  But I digress.

I also see that Honey-Glazed Carrots and Cauliflower Cheese are standard vegetable sides on pub menus and that these days there's almost always a vegetarian option.  In fact there is one pub that is completely vegan:  The Black Heart.  And yes, they do a Sunday Roast.

So many pubs and so many Sunday Roasts to choose from!

What happens in 50 years

I should never leave posts in draft mode but publish them, come what may.

Here's one from September, writing about the places we lived in Bogotá.  By now we have been there and back but were only able to search out the Carrera 38 #24-59 address between the Universidad Nacional and Centro Nariño.

(September posting)

Today I finally hauled out my old letters from Colombia to Susan, Fernando and Mother and Daddy (which they so considerately took the effort of saving for me) so that I could identify where we lived in Medellin and Bogota in the 1970s.  And here are those 3 addresses:

Calle 30A #81-137, Medellin

Calle 1 #71d-52, Bogota

Carrera 38 #24-59, Bogota

The only address that is problematic is the Carrera 38 address in Bogota because it looks like they changed number of the cross-street.  I should mention here that the address systems in Bogota and Medellin are supremely logical:  the house number consists of the cross street number followed by the house number.  So the address at Carrera 38 shows you that the cross street is Calle 24.  Calles run east-west, carreras run north-south.  In the street view of that Calle, a lot of the houses have two address plaques, evidently the old and the new.  And of course, the panaderia and the carniceria that were there in the 70s aren’t there now.

The neighborhood that has changed the most is the one in Medellin:  it is no longer residential but appears purely commercial with a huge mall across the street:  Centro Comercial Los Molinos.  When we lived there it had the feeling of a small town but now it is definitely part of an urban metropolis, with Harry’s Pizza in the same block.