Fact of life, Is there a more unfashionable meal than the carvery? 1970s laughing stocks such as Arctic roll and chicken Kiev have been reinvented by chefs and rediscovered by food lovers, but the carvery resists any warm glow of nostalgia. It remains the butt of a joke, a restaurant experience that, in the way it seems to encapsulate the narrowness of small-town British life, has become a bleakly comic trope. Adrian Mole has found himself at Ye Olde Carvery in Frisby-on-the-Wreake confronted by “ye olde foode congealing behind the bar”. Under hypnosis, Alan Partridge fantasised about whisking Ursula Andress away to High Wycombe’s Moat House Hotel: “You’ll love it. It’s got a 24-hour carvery.”
We all know why the carvery’s reputation is languishing in this way. Carveries are everywhere in Britain – the all-you-can-eat £6.99 roast is a staple of the British high street – but, ever since the then catering giant Lyons first introduced a carvery at its Regent Palace Hotel in the 50s, this has been a race to the bottom. A revolutionary self-service meal, the carvery was always more about cutting staff costs than delivering pleasure. Subsequently, pubs across the country have energetically worked that bottom line with cheap meats and sloppy cooking. Think carvery and the image that comes to mind is one of overcooked joints left to dry out under hot lamps alongside soggy veg, cold, greasy roast potatoes and Yorkshires as lifeless as Egyptian papyrus. And possibly a few years older.
Which is all a bit sad. Or certainly a missed opportunity. Who would not like the idea of being able to stuff yourself (unless you’re banned for eating too much) on every potential element of a Sunday roast, mixing and matching meats with abandon, even if it is just turkey, gammon and beef? Plus, there is nothing inherently flawed about such catering. Carveries are often bad because the core ingredients are poor, and then everything is (over)cooked in advance for convenience. But with a little more thought and care it would be easy to produce a superior carvery: occasionally, you do hear of pubs trying to ramp up standards.
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There are couple of Les Routiers-approved pubs in the Midlands that cook their carvery joints in (ooooh, get them!) an Aga and, curiously, the south-west and Cornwall particularly seems to be a bit of a hotbed of next-level carvery action. The Norway Inn in Truro serves local venison, while the Lanhydrock Hotel offers a choice of five meats, including Cornish pork and lamb alongside “imaginatively” cooked vegetables.
However, the most ambitious attempt to redefine our perception of the carvery (and its cousin, the hog roast) will occur in July, when Carve opens in central London. A fast-food operation attempting to tap into our interest in high-protein diets, it will serve a choice of “impeccably sourced”, freshly carved meats in £6.95 “carvepots”. Meats such as roasted bacon, eight-hour cooked salt beef and smoked pork leg will be sliced over healthy salads and slaws. Combinations will include jerk-roasted turkey with coconut rice, black-eyed peas and Scotch bonnet relish or short-horn beef with roast cherry tomatoes, spelt, parsley and capers. Those will initially be served as set meals, but the long-term plan is to allow customers to mix ‘n’ match meats and sides. Founder Daniel Bear says:
"We can tell you the postcode of each and every joint, its husbandry, what it was fed on. Another point of difference is our insistence on sous-videing first, and other slow-roasting techniques which I’ve worked on with the chef, Mark Broadbent. It’s all going to be served very quickly, too. At lunch, we can serve up to 800 customers, so it’s all about speed. We’ll be roasting off the meats and as soon as they come out of the oven our guys will be carving them. The speed we’ll be going through them means they won’t have that chance to dry out on a hotplate. And there aren’t any roast potatoes or big, dry Yorkshire puddings. It’s all about superfood bases, top-quality meat and, hopefully, propelling British carvery into the 21st century."
So forward-thinking is Carve that this carvery will even be serving tofu. Would you love to see carvery revitalised? And where can we already get a great one?
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