Sunday Roast Dinner in Malta: The Londoner
IMPORTANT UPDATE (July2015)
The Londoner has since been bought by the company that runs Estilios. I no longer recommend The Londonder. I have been sick quite a few times when eating at Estilio's and can not recommend any restaurant run by the same company.
For the second instalment of my hunt for the best Sunday roast dinner in Malta we are heading over to The Londoner in Paceville, St Julians. The Londoner is a relatively new gastro pub serving great British dishes like fish and chips, pork pies, scotch eggs and hearty stew and dumplings.
The Sunday roast dinner at The Londoner, St Julians, Malta will set you back a whopping €16.50 and the only meat available is beef. Hmm. Not a great start! Almost twice the price of the Scotsman and with no choice at all.
The presentation is delightful, like the rest of the food at the Londoner, it comes on a thick wooden tray atop a sheet of baking parchment. It looks great but the parchment is not really practical for a gravy soaked meal as it becomes soggy and tears and you'll end up eating quite a bit of the paper.
The portions for the Sunday roast dinner at The Londoner are pretty big and you get a large yorkshire pudding, loads of meat, two types of potato (yay! Mashed and roasted), roasted carrots, roasted parsnip and roasted onion.
The yorkshire is enormous, I usually would want at least 2 but the size of this is just perfect. It is super crispy, which I usually prefer, but this was a little over hard.
The meat portion was good, although shame that beef is the only option (I generally prefer chicken). Now the meat is hard for me to judge- it was thinly sliced and cooked medium rare I would say- it was very very pink in the middle which I just don't enjoy. I felt like I was eating raw meat so I could only really eat around the edges but it's all personal preference.
Loving two types of potato and they were both perfect. The mash was creamy and seasoned so it tasted amazing and the roasted were crispy on the outside and a ball of fluff inside.
It's a roast so of course the veg should be roasted too, so I was very happy about the carrots and the parsnips and the onions.
The Sunday roast dinner at The Londoner was nice- I loved all the food except the meat (kind of a big part though!) and the portion was big but the price is just way over the top. When it's so cheap and easy to make one at home I don't know why you'd ever pay that much for a sunday roast dinner (unless you're me and it's for 'research purposes'!).
I'd recommend the Londoner a hundred times over for their super cute decor, friendly staff and their other great dishes just not for the roast dinner.
I wish they'd use aircon when it's hot, make the Sunday roast dinner more reasonable and cook that meat a little more!