Friends who had been at the Fleetwood Mac concert at the Dome (I still call it that) suggested we meet up for lunch in Greenwich on Sunday. Knowing that the area on Sunday in the summer would be awash with visitors, it was decided to book something. With my list of suggestions rejected, the Vanbrugh was selected on the basis of location and other reviews, which for the most part, excepting Christmas, are favourable. It is a pub restaurant of the current breed, but serves nothing clever, and only mildly pretentious. (I have decided to add in a pretention score to my ratings as pretentious eating is infecting the world in a way less controllable than Ebola).
The place sells itself as a 'local' pub, and in fact based on its location up a side street, you would never pass it unless you meant to. Thus starts part of the conundrum of how do you price food and drink for locals? There is a fairly comprehensive web site at http://thevanbrugh.co.uk/ and the menus are there to see. Interestingly although the web site looks a little old, the menus are still current.
The place is fairly attractive by pub standards with tables to sit at, a restaurant area, and a softer area with big settees and low tables. The restaurant is fairly small, and on Sunday, the food spills out to all available space. The menu and prices are the same inside or without the restaurant. The kitchen looks pretty small, and I guess they did well to cope with the number of covers on Sunday lunchtime (40+, possibly 50) all things considered.
The menu for main roast Sunday lunch is simple with all the usual meats and fried fish and a vegetarian option. Orders are taken at the bar, and paid for in advance (I find that this reduces your leverage if anything goes wrong).
I ordered the roasted pork loin with black pudding, apple sauce and pork jus. I requested that the black pudding be replaced by pork stuffing, which was no problem to them.
As you can see, the pork was a loin chop (note the bone). This has confused people in the past who thought this might be a pork chop, but the bone was a rib. It is difficult to tell if this was pork jus, as the gravy/sauce was quite a dark colour. As there was a bed of red cabbage, it could have gone either way, but others have noted that there is cook confusion about which sauce/gravy/jus to put on. By the time this arrived, I found it unacceptable in temperature, scoring a 6.7 on the CHOF scale in some parts. I am guessing that the 7 meals between us were plated out in the kitchen during a time period, and what ever went on first got cold. Not good. I rejected the meal, and some time late a replacement came (not a reheat), but minus the stuffing. A bit better, at an 8.
My wife wanted two starters rather than a roast main. She ordered the curried mussels and the thai beef salad. Only the latter made it to the table, and when asked we were told that as the mussels were a new menu item, they had not made it from the epos system to the kitchen. However, they managed to make it on to the bill, so I think this was so much BS. In the event, the starter salad was so large, that another dish was not needed. We did get our money back, reluctantly.
So all in all, whilst the food was fine once we had it the way we wanted it, it was all a bit slapdash, in that my food was not hot enough for me (I guess the locals are not so fussy), and the ordering was too chaotic considering the shortness of the menu and that we ordered before it got busy. For the prices they charge for a straightforward Sunday Roast, this should have been better. It was expensive, with main course roast costing between £13 to £18. This is a back street in Greenwich, not a tourist hot spot, and the cooking and food are run of the mill.
The drinks were also a bit on the expensive side for a pub. A large glass of house white wine was £8 and my half of (very nice draft Suffolk) cider was £3.50. Just as well there was no service charge in the pub, but there is 10% if you eat the same meal in the restaurant.
So not pub grub as we know it, and it is lucky that most of their clients are local and tolerate the slap dash approach.
