1251 Restaurant Review: A Stonking Sunday Roast, Preluded By Measly Starters

Let's start at the very middle — a very good place to start.

Dear lord, Restaurant 1251's roast beef dinner is good. The 50 day aged short rib of beef: beautifully ballsy and fringed with saline melt-in-the-mouth fat. The potatoes: brazenly sizzling away in beef dripping, like it's the 1950s and cholesterol isn't yet a 'thing'.  The smoked bone marrow: every bit the scrape-it-dry bonus you'd hope for from a £25 roast. The cauliflower cheese: honestly, we've never liked the stuff, but 1251's is a silky, truffle-drizzled bowl of wonderful.

The only disappointment is the Yorkshire pud: a touch cold, flaccid and most criminal of all dainty — the weak link on the plate.

It's not the only size issue at 1251, though. A fragment of soda bread starter barely covers the size of a postage stamp, although the seaweedy butter is more moreish than a Netflix boxset. The smoked haddock and leek toastie starter (£5.50!) is so diddy, it evokes actual laughter from us. Elsewhere, the Bloody Mary Martini is a bizarre concoction of vodka with feeble 'tomato tea' — a try-hard hybrid, when either a martini or a Bloody Mary would have been infinitely more welcome.  

Then again, did we mention that the roast is absolutely stupendous?

The Sunday roast is available every week at 1251. £25pp, minimum of two people.