The Pembury Tavern, Amhurst Road, www.individualpubs.co.uk/pembury/

A Sunday Session of the mature kind to talk about this time. Given we were both horribly hungover the mid-afternoon pub session was replaced by a visit to Epping Forrest. Epping Forrest is only 23 mins from Bethnal Green, who knew? Obviously if the rest of Hackney did then it would be a full of people trying to recreate Withnail and I – but it wasn’t, so they don’t. Walking in the forest is normally reserved for old people and doggers but we went looking for sloe berries to infuse the finest gin Gordon could supply. After 4 hours of walking through mud we had about 12 berries, which does not equal the quarter pound needed to make sloe gin. Also, the quaint country pubs they talk about don’t actually exist in real life, they are full of weird towns people and late 90s food. So we returned to the safety of Hackney to get Sunday lunch.

Arriving back to Hackney I wanted a simple combination of non-Sunday roast food and she wanted a veggy Sunday roast. This is no mean feat, we went to the Broadway, the Cat and Mutton, the London Fields, considered Lardo and ended up in the Pembury Tavern. Now I hear some people shouting ‘why don’t you have roast you crazy welsh nutter’ – I don’t because they are not very good – meat, dry, soggy potatoes, gravy – Sunday roast is the most overrated food out there, after tuna. Oh, and they make pubs smell like cabbage.

However the Pembury Tavern satisfied both our wants. The PT menu on a Sunday covers your main roasts all at very reasonable prices. The veggie nut roast was a mere £8 (amazing compared to Cat and Mutton £14 for VEG!) and the Italian based menu is better than most Italian restaurants. I opted for a ‘Tagliolini Alluovo con polpa di granchio, Chorize & Chilli’ with handmade pasta. This is obviously not normal pub food, and it was the best pasta I have had in a while. The pasta was very light, almost noodle like and the sauce was a deep tomato ragu full of fish, chorizo and capers with a decent kick. It was a punchy dish and cost a ridiculous £8.95. The pub also serve loads of excellent pizzas (and a pizza burger…) and the garlic flatbread had enough garlic butter to make the brown paper it was placed on go as see through as cling film, basically amazing . The nut roast item was shockingly not dry and included a veggy gravy – at least she hoped it was veggy, who can really know. 

The pub itself is laidback and ramshackle in a good way. The beers and wines are cheap and actually really good, and generally you are a bit unlucky if you don’t get a table. This places seems like it is an after-work hangout. However with this menu, they could swap the shoddy chairs and tables with something from Ikea and get a tablecloth, and it could easily be a competitor with Soho’s finest Italian establishments – but hopefully they wont.