It’s the most magnificent meal of the week ...

(and here’s where to get your fix)

Golden roast potatoes, billowing Yorkshire puds, a perfectly juicy joint... and lashings of gorgeous gravy. Sunday lunch? Our star foodie reckons...

IT’S the lunch that waits for no man, a Sunday feast of i conic allure. Which is why that blessed roast is such a sacred affair, a cornerstone of home and hearth. Timing is everything – as the meat rests, the gravy is made. And as gravy bubbles, the potatoes get their last-minute blast to ensure that every part is crisp, golden and brilliantly burnished.

At that exact point, the table is gathered, eager supplicants awaiting their Sunday sacrament. Leave it too long and all is ruined. Spuds go soggy, the meat cold, the veggies wan and weary. In short, it’s very much a domestic affair, one best avoided in pubs and restaurants across the land – too many bad memories of dry, dreary meat, wretched potatoes and insipid gravy have instilled a fear of eating it anywhere else but home.

There are, though, some notable exceptions. Places where the meat is chosen with loving care, the beef cooked rare, the lamb cooked pink. Where the vegetarian option moves beyond goat’s cheese salad, where Yorkshire puddings billow rather than bore, and the gravy’s good enough to slurp. These places are few and far between, but they do exist. Because if you’re going to trust this most magnificent of lunches to someone else, it had damned well better be good.

My l i s t , whi c h mi x e s b o t h laid-back local and the rather more exalted, is not exhaustive. Of course it’s not, although I’ve asked the opinions of eating experts and friends alike. You’ll all have your own adored places, and quite right too.

But the 50 places below take their Sunday lunches seriously. As, of course, do we all…