We will witness the end of an era next week as JD Wetherspoon dishes out its last Sunday Roast.
The pub chain is moving to a new weekend menu, and people aren’t sure how to react.
Everyone has their own opinion on the humble roast dinner.
For everyone who rocks up every Sunday for their weekly home comforts, there’s another who prefers all-day brunches to meat and veg.
With that in mind, we thought we’d speak to someone who knows their stuff when it comes to the Wetherspoon conundrum – Kit Caless, the man behind the iconic Wetherspoon’s Carpets tumblr.
JOE: What do you see filling that Sunday gap for pub-goers? Are Wetherspoon’s own suggestions a good starting point?
The Spoons carpet blog gets the most submissions on Tuesday and Thursday night.
Using this basic data, you could say that the British people like nothing more than steak and chips with a glass of cheap red, or a pint of Tuborg with a curry. The new Sunday menu seems to reflect that.
If I had my way, every night would be curry night at Spoons. However, I think there’s room on Sundays for a world cuisine favourite; the kebab.
Not the kebab in pitta you get at 2am from the Ocakbasi after a misadventure, but the posh kebabs you get when you sit down at the back of a Turkish place under those lovely photos of Hagia Sophia and General Ataturk.
Which TV finale most represents the extinction of Sunday Club? The bafflement of The Sopranos? The out-with-a-bang explosiveness of Breaking Bad?
The last episode of Friends is most appropriate.
The cast are older, fatter and moving on from their previously free and single lives.
Chandler says to the apartment as they walk away for the final time, ‘and thanks to rent control, you were a steal!’ Sunday roast at Spoons was a steal. Now you’re going to have to pay £17 for a slice of top beef and two potatoes at some open brick, helvetica-stained food-bro pub instead. They paved paradise, and put up a gastro-pub.
Has the mood changed since the announcement, based on your extensive Wetherspoon experience?
I’ve seen more burning pitchforks than normal. Though that might be more to do with the fact that Tuborg is no longer £2.50.
Is it less about the actual roast meat, veg and gravy and more about what Sunday Club represents?
Groucho Marx once said he could never be part of a club that would have him as a member. But he liked duck soup, so what does that tell you about his appreciation of the Sunday roast?
Sunday Club simply cannot have been about the roast meat, but it was space in which a simulacra of your mum’s Sunday roast existed. A kind of hyper-real roast that you knew wasn’t quite right, but you enjoyed with the rest of your Wetherspoon family.
