Restaurant Review: The Charles Lamb Pub

Sunday's are difficult.  You have to work the next morning.  You're hung over from the night before.  You're tired and irritable.  You wanted a lie in and some idiotic birds woke you up with their tuneless warbling.  All a bit rubbish really.  But, there is one thing that makes Sunday's great and that's Sunday lunch.  Given the aforementioned problems, however, not everyone feels up to making one.  The promise of going out instead is tempting, but often disappointing.  Not so the Charles Lamb in Angel!  This lovely pub has a great selection of Meantime beers on tap, good cider and great hangover smiting Bloody Marys at only £4.50 (only in London prices, overpriced in the rest of the world).  Most importantly they have board-games!  No that's not right, sorry. I meant to say most importantly they do a brilliant roasts lunch.





The pub is nice and airy, not too big.  They don't take bookings and it seemed to fill up around two.  It's not a big chain, which is nice these days and the menu looked pretty interesting.  Being Sunday though there was only one thing I wanted - a big bit of roast meat.  There was only one option, rare roast beef with all the trimmings.  Before I talk about the food, though, I want to talk about the service.  Our food was late because the people next to us ordered the same about twenty minutes after us and they got our food. Huff huff, but actually no.  The Charles recovered fantastically.  Not only was my Bloody Mary free, so was my friends Virgin Mary (she was suffering from the aforementioned hangover) AND my Bretton Cider.  Oh AND MY CRUMBLE.  The first round would have more than made up to it, but this was above and beyond the call of duty.  I even checked to make sure it wasn't a mistake and apparently not.  This made me love this place.  Still it wouldn't have had this effect if the food hadn't been fantastic in the first place.

Even places that I really rate well often do sub par Sunday roasts.  This absolutely does not fit into this category.  The two thick pieces of sirloin were beautifully pink and had a good amount of fat, much needed on a cut that can lack flavour.  The meat was rich and had clearly been hung for a good amount of time. The potatoes were tasty, but could have been a bit crisper.  The cabbage with bacon was fantastic and the two Yorkshires were a good foil for the tasty gravy.  The crumble I had for pudding was of similarly high-quality, with a nice sharp apple filling cutting through the sweet, buttery and gooey topping .  All in all an absolutely great pub roast, one of the best I can remember having, in a nice setting that serves great beer and Bloody Marys, whats not to like.  The roast was £13.95 and the crumble £4.50, so good value too.  And last but not least, great friendly staff.