midcornwall.com: Great Restormel Roast Review: The Polgooth Inn, GRRR#3

The Polgooth is the pub I have eaten more Sunday roasts in than any other pub on the planet. So in this sense, I knew what to expect, as did the rest of us who went for the Great Restormel Roast Review of The Polgooth Inn.

Location-wise the Polgooth Inn is delightful, situated on the side of the little valley that runs into the Pentewean valley. For those who like walking, it's a nice 40 minutes walk from town via two varied routes.

If you ring the pub up they will tell you need to book well in advance. We have never booked and in general we have found that apart from in the summer you can get in easy. Even more so with the new extension.

We found a table for all six of us, took a sip of our respective drinks and then revvvved up the reviewing for the third in the Great Restormal Roast Reviews. Hold tight, here it comes…

Pros:

The service - The food came promptly and all at the same time. Nice staff and as always, good service.
The price – £6.95 for the roast. ((But the veggie alternative is a very expensive £8.95)).
The dessert – Profiteroles jacked up with extra yum.
The pub – It’s a lovely pub, great atmosphere and location.
Mashed parsnip – Unusual and very tasty.

Cons:

The gravy – This was the worst we have had so far. I should say that the Polgooth gravy is normally much better but today it was watery and flavourless.
The roast potatoes - Stodgy and more boiled than roasted. Not a smidgen of crispiness on any of them. The worst roasties so far in the GRRR.
The meat - This was a bit scraggly and over cooked.
"Canteeny" - That's a new word invented just for the GRRR. It means that there is something about the roast that makes you think it was cooked in a big canteen by machines rather than by a ninja roaster or your gran. All of our roasts were quite canteeny.

Score and Conclusions

The Polgooth Inn is a renowned and successful pub for a Sunday roast. With its pedigree and our previous experience we expected it to be top of the league, but we all felt that it's cutting very close to being a victim of its own success. To put it simply, it is teetering on a roast precipice the other side of which is a chasm of scraggly beef. At the bottom of this chasm is a watery mire of disgraced gravy dotted by the occasional pallid and under roasted spud. There are two ways to go: back upwards, providing the area with continued high quality Sunday eating, or.... there is the other way.