Sunday best: chefs on the perfect roast

Back in the UK Hawksmoor is not resting on its laurels with its revamped Sunday lunch, including a selection of new side dishes accompanying a range of sharing cuts. Introduced this month, the roast has been overhauled after 12 years of the same offer – dry-aged beef rump, beef dripping roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, roast carrots, buttered greens, roast garlic and bone marrow gravy (now £27), a meal twice voted Best Sunday Lunch in the UK by Observer Food Monthly.

So why mess with it? "Everyone is doing amazing roasts now, right? So, if you don't up your game, you won't stay relevant," says Hawksmoor executive chef Matt Brown.

He's not wrong – the British Sunday roast has had a renaissance and pubs and restaurants up and down the country are ramping up efforts to elevate Britain's most iconic dish.

The perfect roast

Viral Instagram account Rate Good Roasts has been reviewing Sunday offerings around the country for six years, producing an annual top 10 that is much quoted in the national press. It judges 10 different components of what makes a good roast, starting with meat and ending with sides. "What makes the perfect roast? There should always be a stand-out dish on the specials board, such as porchetta, and imaginative sides," declares ‘chief eating officer' Tom Casson.

From Manchester's Ducie Street, which boasts a whole menu dedicated to cauliflower cheese (Rate Good Roasts' current favourite), to London's Temper restaurants' smoked and pulled lamb shoulder with mint sauce and smoked baby chicken with chimichurri, Sunday roasts are getting creative.

And while the standard roast offering at Hawksmoor still reigns, it also now offers ‘Sunday Feasting' sharing cuts at its 11 restaurants. "Now you can build your own roast at Hawksmoor," grins Brown.

There are six sides to choose from, starting with stuffing. The menu reads: "Other Sunday roasts come with a delicious stuffing. Why not roast beef?" The £7 side is made with bone marrow (40%), beef sausage (40%), onions and lots of fresh herbs. What the menu doesn't reveal is that the bread-based binder – spoiler alert – is Paxo, the packet stuffing mix found in most British store cupboards since 1901, when it was conceived by a Manchester butcher who wanted to make Sunday lunch more exciting.

"It's like that Carlsberg ad, if Hawksmoor did stuffing, it would probably be the best in the world. I also wanted to evoke childhood memories – for it to taste a bit like your mum's stuffing," explains Brown. Cue Paxo, albeit making up under 20% of the mix. It's the most popular side, along with the celeriac mash and sausage gravy (£7). "You buy into the dream as soon as you see the words ‘sausage gravy' – straight away everyone is interested," adds Brown.

Usually, Brown knocks heads with co-founder Huw Gott on new dishes, but this time it was all down to Brown. His favourite side? The rainbow chard, anchovies and green sauce (£6.50). "We needed a green dish, so we went for rainbow chard. I love anchovies and they're great with beef, plus you get the crunch of the stalks and those soft leaves. All our sides must go with beef," enthuses Brown.

Game on

It might be all about beef at Hawksmoor, but it's invariably game for Sunday lunch at the Woodsman in Stratford-upon-Avon. With menus overseen by chef Brett Graham of London's the Ledbury and run by game enthusiast and chef Mike Robinson, who also operates deer management and supply business the Deer Box, it's no wonder deer tops the bill at this wood grill-fired eatery, especially on Sundays.

A top seller is a Graham creation from his time behind the stoves at sister restaurant the Harwood Arms: a braised and glazed shoulder of wild Gloucestershire roe deer served with ‘dirty mash'. "Roe shoulder is such a great sharing cut for Sunday lunch. Plus, it's available all year round and one of our six indigenous species," says Robinson.

Roe shoulder is browned on the grill before being braised overnight in red wine until the blade falls out. The joint is then brought back together by wrapping it in bacon, smothering it in a herb butter and holding it in a vac pack with a ladle of stock ready for service. The final touch is an apple glaze before it is roasted for five minutes in the wood-fired oven.

"It's enormously popular and you can't get it wrong," says Robinson, whose mission it is to get people eating deer year-round, particularly for Sunday lunch – just don't call it venison. "Our shoulder of roe deer and pave of fallow deer don't taste remotely the same. Venison is a medieval word that means ‘meat of the hunt' – it could be anything. Britain has six species of deer, and they all taste very different so we should always refer to the species on menus."

It's not just deer he's banging the drum for – game birds, too, make the perfect Sunday roast, urges Robinson. "We sell a lot of wild duck and partridge. A pheasant for two is also very popular. We poach the birds first in a game or chicken stock, then bag them loosely and hold it there, before finishing to order on the woodfired oven. That way you get a beautifully juicy bird."

And the dirty mash? "Think potatoes Robuchon-style, with lots of butter and double cream, sprinkled with shredded dried venison shoulder and a herby crumb then drowned in a deer gravy – it's disgustingly good," he says.

Piggy in the middle

Pork belly isn't usually a big seller for chef director Ben Tish at London's Cubitt House group of gastropubs as it's deemed too fatty by some. But fashion it into an Italian-style porchetta and serve it to the Notting Hill crowd on a Sunday at the Princess Royal pub and it flies. "It's our biggest seller for Sunday lunch," he reveals.

A true porchetta is made from whole suckling pig, deboned and aggressively seasoned with flavourings such as fennel, garlic and rosemary, before being roasted in a wood-fired oven, but Tish prefers to use Middle White pork belly.

"It's so forgiving. We salt it overnight with thyme to get a bit of moisture out, then we score the skin and stuff it with day-old Coombeshead Farm sourdough combined with loads of marjoram, sage, oregano, garlic, shallots, dried chilli, lemon zest and bit of milk. Then we roll it up, tie it, and roast at 230ºC for 30-35 mins until the skin puffs up and it's nice and crispy, then turn it down to 160ºC for about an hour, before resting, ready for Sunday lunch."

The dish is always served with small, whole roast apples, quince or pears, depending on the season, and the group's red wine and Marsala gravy (which is served with all roasts), plus the usual Sunday lunch trimmings.

Suckling pig is the preferred meat on Sundays at Cardiff's Asador 44. The Spanish restaurant, co-created by three Welsh siblings who travelled across the Basque region and beyond, specialises in wood-fired grill cooking (hence the name asador, which refers to the revolving grills that reign in the region). One third of the Bar 44 group Owen Morgan says: "The open wood-fired grill lends itself massively to a Sunday roast, so we have offered it right from the start."

Alongside the à la carte menu, the Sunday offering for two includes Segovia slow-roast suckling pig shoulder in a cider sauce (£80), 500g cuts of ex-dairy cow sirloin, served with a bone marrow-enriched Rioja sauce (£65), and 600g cuts of Welsh bone-in sirloin (£80), all served with jamon fat roast potatoes, jamon fat Yorkshire puddings and other Spanish-influenced sides. And customers can't get enough, with four out of five ordering the sharing roasts for Sunday lunch.

"With 10 pieces of meat on the grill at any one time, at different heights, it's quite the sight – you need a lot of skill," says Morgan. The suckling pig, though, cooks in the wood-fired bread oven. "We cook it whole, the traditional way. It takes three hours from start to finish to get that perfect glass-like skin. It's crazily tender, rich meat."

For the roast potatoes and Yorkshire puddings, they combine rendered bellota-grade Iberico lard from Brindisa with tocino, a salted cured back fat. "The smoked paprika gives a lovely orange colour and savouriness to the Yorkshire puds and roasted potatoes, which get whole bashed garlic and rosemary added towards the end," says Morgan. Also popular is the leek gratin side made with smoked Northern Spanish cheese Idiazabal, and the Manchego cauliflower cheese.

Knife and York

Elevating the Sunday roast is something Yorkshire chef Andrew Pern knows all about. Alongside the refined roast menu at the Star Inn at Harome is the Yorkshire pudding royale (£15), chosen by one in four guests.

"We just wanted to celebrate the humble Yorkshire pudding. There is nothing more famous from our county, so to be able to pimp it up a bit made sense and very much fits our rich-man-poor-man style of cooking. The addition of pan-fried foie gras, shavings of fresh seasonal truffle and Madeira juices gives it a whole new level of luxury," says Pern, who also likes to add foie gras to his toad in the hole.

It's offered as an upgrade to the regular Sunday roasts, which include sirloin of beef with roasted Roscoff onion, fresh horseradish and Black Sheep Ale gravy, and roast loin of Yorkshire-reared pork with a fig and orange sausage roll, Star Inn orchard apple and damson compote and Ampleforth cider juices, both served with duck fat roast potatoes.

Bird is the word

But it's all about stuffed roasted chicken for Sunday lunch at award-winning Newcastle restaurant Cook House. Self-taught chef and food blogger Anna Hedworth opened the restaurant in two sea containers overlooking the Ouseburn River in 2014, moving to a larger site down the road in 2018. The ‘sharing chickens' have become so popular that diners must reserve them in advance.

"Crème fraiche is stuffed between the skin and the meat along with herbs, garlic and lemon," explains Hedworth, who also has a kitchen garden on-site, where she grows the herbs for the chicken and other dishes. "We use lovage a lot, but it depends what herbs are in season, so it changes regularly," she adds.

The whole chicken, sourced from Heathcote Farm in Cumbria, is served with roasted new potatoes, house aioli and a seasonal green salad. "I like food which has a good balance of sweet, savoury and sharp flavours, with texture and crunch and made with as little faff as possible. Sunday lunch for me harks back to big family gatherings, where plates just kept on appearing."

But the last word on what makes a roast perfection goes to Casson: "Do you know what makes the perfect Sunday roast? When I go to bed still full."

Ben Tish's perfect roast potatoes

"I always use Rooster potatoes. I boil them until just before they break up, cool them and leave them in the fridge overnight, uncovered, so they get really dry.

"I then put them straight into a hot tin with hot fat, put in a 200°C oven, tossing them a couple of times during cooking. Our pubs use beef dripping mainly, but at home I always use extra virgin olive oil. It's a complete myth that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. Yes, it has a slightly lower flash point than olive oil, but it's fine for light frying and roasting and far healthier. I've always cooked with it and never had a problem," says Tish, who favours a roasted chicken crown at home for Sunday lunch.

Andrew Pern's Yorkshire pudding royale

Sweet onion marmalade

• 200g white onions, thinly sliced
• 200g white sugar
• 40ml white wine vinegar

Gravy

• 1l reduced veal jus
• ½ bottle Yorkshire ale of choice
• 3 banana shallots, halved and lightly fried

Yorkshire pudding

• 100g plain flour, sieved
• 3 fresh eggs
• 100ml full fat milk
• Seasoning

Foie gras

• 6 x 50g slices of foie gras, seasoned

To garnish

• 3-4 fresh black truffle shavings per person (used tinned if fresh is not available and put through the gravy instead)
• Fresh thyme, deep-fried

Make the sweet onion marmalade by placing the onions, sugar and vinegar into a pan and reducing until the onions are caramelised and the liquid has reduced to a syrupy consistency that coats the back of a spoon. Keep warm. To make the gravy, combine the ingredients and heat.

To make the Yorkshire pudding, blend together the flour, eggs and milk, then pass through a sieve. Season. Heat a Yorkshire pudding/muffin tray. Add a little oil in the bottom of each one and heat to 180°C until smoking hot. Fill with batter until ¾ full and cook for about 25 minutes or until set and firm.

Pan-fry the foie gras.

To serve, place some warm sweet onion marmalade inside each Yorkshire pudding. Place a slice of foie gras on top of each pudding, then pour over the gravy. Garnish with the black truffle shavings and the thyme, if wished.