Sunday roasts are hard to get right, and even some of the best restaurants and pubs in the land still manage to do it averagely. The best barometer is not the Yorkshire puddings. Everyone seems to be able to deliver hat-sized Yokshires these days.
The same goes for beef pinkness. Anyone can undercook beef too, and you can always heat it through again for people who prefer it a bit less abattoirial. Without a time machine, it’s a lot trickier to make overcooked beef pink again.
No, it’s all about the roast potatoes. If they’ve got them right, you can be fairly sure that they’ve got everything else right too.
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The slightly exotic fenugreek-coated roasties at Maray are a straight 10/10. The roasties at Ducie Street Warehouse and 10 Tib Lane, both often celebrated for their Sunday lunches, much less so, though that was just on the occasions I visited. Bad roast potatoes live long in the memory, sadly.
Everything else was very decent indeed at both those places, but sending a pale roast potato out of the kitchen should come with at least the threat of a custodial sentence to deter repeat offenders. I’d rather wait as long as it takes than be served up a roastie that doesn’t have circa 3mm of browned, crispy potato on the outside and starchy fluff in the middle.
The roast potatoes last weekend at Folk, on Burton Road in Didsbury, were perfection. It was a very good sign. This neighbourhood bar had a refurb a couple of years ago, and now it’s effortlessly stylish, the kind of place that has an effect on local house prices.
It has wood-panelled, leather-padded booths like in the type of old fashioned 70s cafe that tragically doesn’t really exist anymore, and tongue and groove cladding painted in tasteful colours. If it had the substance but not the style, this would perhaps go unmentioned, but Folk has both so it does.
The roast has not long been offered here, but now sits among its menu of small plates and brunches on a Sunday. There’s chicken (£16.50), beef (£18), an interesting pan roasted piece of bass for the peskies (£14) and a mushroom, pistachio and cranberry wellington (£16.50) for the veggies.
But if the roasties are a bellwether for the general quality of a roast, the sides just cement it. And what sides they are. Cider and honey glazed pigs in blankets (£6). A smoked butter and wholegrain mustard mash (£5), for those who require even more potato.
But best of all, a cauliflower cheese (£6.50) made with Tunworth, a British-made camembert-style cheese, and perhaps the greatest in the world. Yes, the world. And because it was there looking at us - certainly not because it goes with a roast - a plate of Korean fried chicken thigh (£9) was ordered too, without regret.
Nothing disappointed. Nothing at all. Not the chicken, a whole breast cooked perfectly, not the beef, which was blushing pink. Not the root vegetable mash, not the just-blanched-enough verdant green broccoli. Not the giant, hat-sized yorkshire pudding.
Not the pigs in blankets, not the cauliflower cheese, not the Korean fried chicken, which, while it had no business being there, was superbly good and I’d do it again.
Not the Northern Monk pale ale that was the perfect drink for it, and not the warm chocolate brownie with milk ice cream that was gone three minutes after taking its mugshot. Having had enough crappy carveries and upscale roasted disappointments on the sabbath to lament for a lifetime, this was pitch flipping perfect.
I might not bother going anywhere else.
Folk, 169-171 Burton Rd, West Didsbury, Manchester M20 2LN
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