The Green Goose, Bow

I woke up hungover and I really couldn’t be arsed, but I had a table booked at The Green Goose in Bow, so here we go.

The Green Goose, Bow, Pork Belly Roast Dinner
© Copyright – Roast Dinners In London 2023
Twitter - rate limit exceeded.

I’m done.

I don’t even need to write the fucking review, do I? But I guess I have to get some joy out of the day.

My accomplice was a short-notice cancellation due to ill health – I felt rough and could barely be bothered to get up, and I had roughly the same levels of motivation towards finding a replacement accomplice as Elon Musk has towards paying Twitter’s hosting bills.

Google saying "bitch better have my money" to Elon Musk.

Solo dining it was. But that’s fine by me, I could just sit there, nurse a beer and scroll through Twitter…oh…maybe not.

Unless I pay £9 a month or whatever it is for our Free Speech Overlord (free as long as you don’t want to consume too much free content, you don’t call the overlord any bad names like cis-gendered, you don’t write any nasty things about countries with a penchant for detaining its citizens for years in re-education camps that happen to have Tesla factories, and you don’t put any effort into debunking conspiracy theories) to bless me with the ability to read 6,000 posts a day.

Meme:

Elon saying no to censoring disinformation.
Elon saying yes to censoring everyone.

The Goose Is Cooked

Guess I could always create an account on Truth Social. Or hell, even use Facebook.

I do have a Reddit group for Roast Dinners In London but it currently has a grand total of 3 members, including myself. I gave up after a week. But I might start posting into the void once more, see if it catches on.

Anyway, I somehow made it to The Green Goose in Bow. Not exactly the most salubrious area – were this Paris then one might expect burnt out cars to be littering the route, but instead it is London and there were just young people, and maybe the occasional dodgy person on route.

The estate vibes on Google Maps were another reason to question what I was doing by going to The Green Goose…but inside was a perfectly respectable looking pub. One imagines back in the day, it could have been a proper rough east end boozer, but we’ve gentrified it now, and people go to pubs to eat burnt roast dinners instead of glass each other. Mostly.

The Green Goose is split into three themed areas, the bar at the front, a more restaurant space at the back, and also a little garden. All perfectly pleasant with your standard 2020’s design – the restaurant even had proper tables and chairs – yep, proper tables and chairs in an east London pub.

The Green Goose, Bow, Sunday Roast menu
© Copyright – Roast Dinners In London 2023

Options were white chicken at £16.00 (because chicken comes in multiple colours?), sirloin of beef at £18.50 or pork belly at £17.00.

In advance, my plan was to order the chicken, but I’d had chicken twice the day before and still had some in the fridge, so I went for my favourite – pork belly.

You already know what happens now. You seen it. You’ve judged it. And you haven’t judged incorrectly. My roast took around 10 minutes to arrive. I still wasn’t rate limited in that time. Actually I think I was reading an obituary of Daniel Ellsberg. I say reading, though it was more looking at words but not processing them.

The Roast Is Fucked

Ahhh which photograph shall I use?

The Green Goose, Bow, Pork Belly Sunday roast
© Copyright – Roast Dinners In London 2023

We’ll start with the carrots, because I almost always do and at least these were inoffensive – you’ve likely already taken office at multiple things on my plate, and I will shortly clarify further as to how offended I was.

But the carrots themselves, well they were plentiful, with a bit of a crunch – lacking much in the way of flavour, but this is perhaps a relief.

I didn’t mind the kale either. It was too salty for personal tastes, and rather coarse, but in the grand scheme of life – or at least this plate, it was fair.

Gosh I’m onto the potatoes already – I’m not sure I want to use the word “roast” in association here. Close up?

The Green Goose, Bow, shit roast potatoes
© Copyright – Roast Dinners In London 2023

Wow 7 potatoes. Hallelujah. Someone has finally listened. Alas I didn’t want 7 – at least 7 of these roasted potatoes.

Pretty much the chef had dumped a load of waxy, summer-style cheap potatoes in an oven tray and left them. I couldn’t be arsed either today. But some of these were grey inside in parts. They tasted stale. 7 roasted, shit potatoes and I didn’t even eat them all.

The Pork Belly Is Overcooked

When the roast arrived, I sent a photograph to my accomplice who cancelled to tell her she’d won. She asked me what the fuck the Yorkshire puddings were about.

Though actually they were the highlight of the meal. Ish. Well one was enjoyable anyway – yes it looks shite, but it was pretty fluffy inside, if fluffy throughout instead of having a correct structure. The second was meh or maybe I could just taste burnt pork only by then.

Another close-up?

The Green Goose, Bow, burnt pork belly
© Copyright – Roast Dinners In London 2023

I can imagine the conversation in the kitchen, “hey I’ve burnt the pork belly, what do I do?”. “Oh just put some thyme on top, the customer won’t be able to tell it is burnt then”.

Yes I can still taste burnt pork belly. It was burnt. How? Why? Why serve it? Why the hell are you sending that to a customer? Somehow it was even slightly pink inside yet totally overcooked.

Sure, I could have cut off the burnt part, but the rest of the pork belly was dry and overcooked too. Possibly the worst pork belly I’ve ever had, though The Hand In Hand in Wimbledon is tough competition – and I stress the word tough. Urgh.

Finally, the gravy. I didn’t hate the gravy but it had granule influence, along with some herbs. But even were it amazing, it wasn’t rescuing this.

The Green Goose

Normally when I’m being uncomplimentary about a roast dinner, I do try to find something nice to say, “well I didn’t like the roast but they do have a good beer selection/interesting midweek menu/hottie behind the bar”. I’m not sure how to do that right now.

At the end of the day, the chef and those running the pub are probably not trying to provide burnt meat and stale potatoes. People have off days. The website where I work went down during the week (yeah irony me criticising Twitter) – but the person who made the decision that caused it won’t have done it on purpose either. We are humans and are fallible.

But I do think a decision needed to have been made to not serve that burnt pork belly. Fine – burn it – shit happens. But don’t then serve it to a paying customer. Especially one that unfortunately has London’s premier roast dinner reviewing website (albeit London’s only roast dinner reviewing website). By the way, do you like the new font/colour?

There were things that I didn’t dislike – the carrots were flavourlessly fine, and the weird yorkie was actually good – better than those pretty large yorkies often cooked before and left for hours under a heat lamp.

That burnt pork belly though and the stale potatoes – this was a sad experience, sadder than being a billionaire getting excited about a tweet view count.

Elon Musk tweet celebrating how many views he's had.  Moron.

Gosh what a moron.

One of the chefs actually cleared my plate away and asked me if everything was fine, I was busy staring at the obituary of Twitter Daniel Ellsberg and responded, “yeah yeah” in a far too scared to be honest way. Though when the waiter asked later on, I was a bit more honest.

I assumed this meant that they actually wanted feedback, maybe they had an inkling that all isn’t well with their roasts, but nobody will tell them either. Though if they read this, then they know. This was a crap roast dinner.

My score is a 4.44 out of 10. It is the worst roast dinner of 2023 so far.

I’ll be back next week. There isn’t a plan. I cannot be arsed to make one right now.

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Summary:

The Green Goose, Bow

Station: Bow Road

Tube Lines: Hammersmith & City

Fare Zone: Zone 2

Price: £17.00

Rating: 4.44

Get Booking

https://www.greengooselondon.com/

Instagrim

Loved & Loathed

Loved: Well, the crap-looking yorkie was nicely fluffy.

Loathed: Potatoes were crap and stale, the pork belly was burnt and disgusting.

3 responses to “The Green Goose, Bow

  1. Perhaps white. chicken is breast rather than leg and they didn’t want to trigger anyone using the word breast? Of course, calling it white probably offends a lot more people.

  2. I look forward to the chicken being relabeled as boobie chicken or leggy chicken from now on.

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