For better or worse, I associate Sunday lunch with high drama. As a teenager, it often seemed to be the moment for an argument or even some kind of life-changing big reveal (I’ll save the details for the memoir). There was also, of course, the fact that my parents were divorced: at my dad’s, lunch was swiftly followed by the journey home to my mum, and The Handover. By 4pm, I never knew whether the rumbling of my stomach was down to overindulgence – our Sunday lunches were decadently vast, and my greed, even then, almost boundless – or a nervousness that was born of wanting to please all the adults (and knowing I might fail).
The Freudians out there will say that it’s thanks to this that I have tended to avoid Sunday lunch as an adult. But I don’t think the two things are connected. Unless I’m on holiday – in which case, cheers, and pass the rosé – I often skip lunch, whatever the day. The simple fact is that for a long time, the Sunday roast was out of favour – a trend you noticed mostly, though not exclusively, because the newspapers were always trumpeting its “return”, a roast potato-shaped comeback that would finally see off brunch for ever. When I went north to see my family, it was more in evidence – in pubs, the gravy still ran like Tetley’s – but at home my mum now often served the big Sunday meal in the evening, and it was as likely to be a piece of salmon as a leg of lamb. In London, meanwhile, the prospect of Sunday lunch began to seem almost outlandish in the face of new developments such as yoga and Yotam Ottolenghi: a meal out of the ark, only less eco-friendly because the animals were all dead.
But now I’m calling it. Long live Sunday lunch, for I believe that it really is back at last, English mustard, creamed leeks and all. Admittedly, this conviction is based thus far only on my own (patchy) experiences. But if political pundits are allowed to constantly sniff the air, I don’t see why part-time food writers can’t do the same – especially when it smells so deliciously of crackling. So, here goes. Anecdote one. Before our summer holiday in the Lake District, I quickly discovered not only that those friends who told me I needed to book Sunday lunch six weeks ahead were right, but also that I would struggle to choose a venue, the scallops and best ribs on offer all over the place an almost poignantly far cry from the Dairylea triangles I used to eat as a child in the car park at Broughton-in-Furness en route to Wasdale with my dad. (Yeah, we were hardcore: no weedy Windermere for us).
Anecdote two. I finally managed – to be accurate, our friends L&S finally managed – to get a Sunday lunch booking at the Devonshire in Soho, a pub whose Taylor Swift-like popularity you may already have heard about. Oh my God. We went in at 2.45pm, but if I expected the place to be quietening a little by then, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Even as I tapped my yorkshire pudding with a finger – you want your batter to be melodious, don’t you? – diners continued to arrive, many of them with pints of Guinness in their hands. It was like some huge and wondrous celebration, all kinds of people of all kinds of ages all eating exactly the same thing (you can choose your starter, but the roast beef, which sits under a big silver dome, is non-negotiable).
Our waitress, brisk and lovely, told me they do 500 covers on a Sunday, which made me think that the Devonshire’s publican extraordinaire, Oisín Rogers, really might be some kind of genius (he was prowling the room in his chore jacket, his eyes flicking from side to side like Zendaya’s in that crazy tennis film, Challengers). It wasn’t only that the meat was rare, and the carrots just soft enough, and the horseradish astonishingly abundant. The room fairly pulsated with contentment. Some people (imagine it!) were even talking to the strangers on the next table. I know it sounds cheesy and sentimental, but to me, and perhaps to the entire room, it felt like coming home – and in this sense if no other, I really do hope the future is going to look just a little bit like the past.
