Politics on a Plate: The Roast Divide

15 October 2025

Ben Smith, Co-Founder of London On The Inside

The great British roast

In Britain, we don’t argue about politics at the pub, we argue about roast dinners – and the debates get far more heated. Is beef the only “proper” meat, or does chicken count? Does cauliflower cheese belong, or is it a mid-week lasagne side that’s snuck in uninvited? And then there’s the gravy. As a northerner, I’ve grown up believing gravy is less of a sauce and more of a lifestyle choice. Thin, watery stuff is a crime; it should be thick enough to plaster a wall with.

My own roast politics get complicated. Take mint sauce. It starts out respectable – a dab on the lamb – but then somehow ends up smeared across the carrots, swirled into the potatoes, even stirred into the gravy. I’ve been known to go straight in with the spoon. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it is who I am.

**Is it so complicated after all?**

Then there are the unspoken risks: the time I pretended to shake a little salt onto a mate’s roast and the lid came off, burying one lonely potato under a snowdrift. Still ate it though, obviously.

For the ultimate Sunday reset, give me a clear head and the option to order “a little bit of everything” – the holy grail of roasts – and suddenly it’s Christmas Day in September. Slightly wrong, yes. But that’s the beauty of a pub roast: it doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to taste right.

And so the roast debate rolls on. Whatever your position on Yorkshires, parsnips or peas, we can all agree on one universal truth: there’s no such thing as too much gravy.

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