With who: Dr Vole and The Grumbling Granddad
How much: £10 for roast dinner and all of the trimmings
Come here if: you miss your train
There's a surfeit of places you can get a good Sunday pub lunch in and around Camberwell. It's not got the park views of some of the prettier parts of town, but there's some great old boozers to kick back in with the papers and a pint. I'll do a round up at some point, probably when I've been back to a few of them. The Sun & Doves has a new team in the kitchen since I was last there, The Bear (reviewed here last April) still gets the bulk of the praise in the neighbourhood, and all are being rapidly pursued by new kids on the block at The Tiger and The Crooked Well (opened recently by a team of escapees from The Kensington Roof Gardens). So why did we end up at the Phoenix?
The Phoenix isn't a bad pub, it's just somewhere that's never really lived up to the potential. It was the first pub I went to when I arrived in the area, a beautiful and unusual old building with high ceilings and Victorian design features perched literally over the rail tracks, Siamese twinned with the Denmark Hill ticket office. I knew it as a Yates Wine Lodge back then, a garrulous and gauche youth in clothes that didn't quite fit (a description that worked for both of us), catering to the Doctors and nurses of the local hospital before they fled Camberwell for leafier climes.
A revamp a few years later it turned into the Phoenix, technically one of my closest boozers and one I step past daily on the way back from the daily grind. Yet still I walk past and turn up the hill to the flat or down the road to The Hermit's Cave. Rather harshly I've always put this down to the attitude and experience of the staff. You'd always face a scrum at the bar, mainly because they never knew, or seemingly cared, who was next to be served, and it always felt like a railway pub, aimed at transients, less bothered about pandering to regulars. It's got better recently, a lot better, enough to tempt me back to keep trying again.
A recently revamped Sunday menu promises four roasts, described in terms that point towards a competent buyer at least, if not a chef. I went for the 'roast loin of outdoor reared Norfolk pork' over the '21 day aged West Country Beef'. As a roast, it wasn't half bad. Homemade Yorkshire puddings were a surprise and delight for the Grumbling Granddad, the pork was moist and well flavoured (if the portion was very much on the sparse side) and the roast potatoes had been cooked well the first time round. It'd have been a very competent plate if only it hadn't been so tepid. End of a service you'd have expected it, 45 minutes after the place opened you wouldn't, it screamed that most of the plate had been badly reheated. I would have brought it up, but true to form, the staff, though quiet, were studiously ignoring the few punters in the place.
It's a shame, as there's some real thought on the menu here, it's a hearty, tasty selection of contemporary pub staples with a few that show a real ambition. It's a shame that there were only a handful of tables taken by those waiting anxiously for their trains.
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