Roast, The Floral Hall, Stoney Street, London SE1 (020 7940 1300).
Meal for two, including wine and service, £100
The advance publicity for Roast at London's Borough Market made much of a rotisserie which would be the centrepiece of an open kitchen specialising in hearty, seasonal British cooking. I was hoping for something humungous, bearing at least three whole fat-dripping pigs, possibly being hand-turned by a couple of hairy trolls. After all, Borough Market, over which the restaurant hovers, is a place of abundance; the atmosphere lures you towards excess (as with a casino, you should only go with cash in your pocket and leave both the plastic and the deeds to the house at home). Instead, the rotisserie was a mingy little thing, barely bigger than a microwave.
That disappointment over scale and generosity was repeated across Roast, which, at the moment, is a fantastic opportunity missed. The glass-walled space - lots of white, a bit of polished stone - is handsome, with the main dining room located on a raised area behind the facade salvaged from the old Covent Garden market. But there are also lousy tables and we were on one of them. It backed on to the central banister up the steps to that main dining area and almost every waiter tried to pass through the nine-inch gap between me and it, whacking me on the back as they went.
Some of the food was fine. Grilled pilchards with watercress and lemon to start had been given the heat their richness deserves, and a game broth had an uncompromising depth of flavour. But other pleasures were rare. Sliced bread turned up warm outside and frozen in the middle. The second lot was still stone cold in the centre and the end piece was hard and stale.
In a main course of grilled partridge, the bird had been cooked sympathetically, but braised red cabbage lacked texture and bite. A serving of pork belly with an overly tart apple sauce, while delivering the necessary mix of crisp crackling and soft meat, was mean at £15.50 for what is a cheap cut of meat. And potatoes roasted in dripping were simply poor: dry and floury inside, crash-helmet hard outside, rather than crisp. I wanted to chuck them at the cooks to see how they liked it. I've banged on before about the inability of restaurants to serve me roast potatoes better than the ones I can cook at home, but it still flummoxes me. Plus, they brought us two servings when we asked for one, and didn't drop one from the bill, despite saying they would.
Pudding for me was summed up neither by a lacklustre sherry trifle nor a passable quince and pear crumble but by the jug of custard to accompany the latter, which had separated (usually the result of having let the custard boil).
Dinner here will cost you an easy £100. For that sort of money you have the right to expect a kitchen that knows how to make custard, that won't serve frozen bread and which can roast a bloody potato.
What most infuriates is that this really is the right proposition in the right place. Borough Market deserves a restaurant serving artery-clogging food, made from great ingredients. Roast is a fantastic name. But it needs to be a gastro whorehouse to match the gastroporn on the stalls down below, a place of outrageous and indulgent pleasures. Instead it is a creaking and mealy-mouthed affair which floats so high above the market below it appears to have forgotten to look down.
