Photo by Michael Gardiner
Carving the roast beef
I’m a sucker for a place that does one thing and does it well. It’s a testament to a virtue, increasingly lost of late, that competence matters and in having the courage of one’s convictions. Roast Meat & Sandwich Shop (2820 Historic Decatur Road) at the Liberty Public Market in Liberty Station has that competence and has that courage.
The menu at Roast is short: meat and sides. The roasted meats—porchetta, beef and chicken—come in sandwich, bowls (sandwiches without the annoying bread stuff) or portions (half pound for the porchetta and beef, and whole, half or quarter chickens). There are also sides: roasted potatoes and vegetables, kale Caesar salad, chips and chicharron (sold by weight). But don’t go to Roast for the sides, not even the roasted potatoes or the chicharron. Go there for roast meats.
Traditionally, porchetta is a pig deconstructed, deboned and put back together with skin as sausage casing enclosing layers of stuffing, meat and fat. Nowadays, it’s pork belly rolled around center cut pork loin. At its best—as it was on two trips for me—Roast’s porchetta is glorious, with crispy skin and deeply savory, salty and satisfying meat. On the third, my dining companion got a bowl with a paltry portion of porchetta “featuring” sad, un-crisped, limp and pretty much unappetizing skin. I prefer to see that as an unfortunate aberration.
The roast beef was everything you want roast beef to be: crispy, salty and savory outside with a rosy, medium rare interior. This is the roast beef sandwich you wish your mother made you to take to school instead of leftovers. The sandwich and bowl versions of the roast beef come with pink pickled onions and a tangy chimichurri sauce.
Roast chicken is a seriously cheffy thing. Ask five chefs what they want to put on their menu and six will say “roast chicken.” And Roast’s is very good. The restaurant describes it as “lemon rosemary, crispy skin.” And it is, indeed, all of that (including crispy) as well as seriously juicy. But did they really have to advertise it as “crispy?” It’s almost a case of overpromising and underperforming. It would have seemed crispier if they’d said so less.
Part of the problem with the chicken, indeed an overall problem with everything, was the pace of service. On the good side, every order is hand carved. On the bad side, every order is hand carved. And they take real care with each one. Seriously. What that means is that if you have two orders, the second one is being hand carved while the first one is getting cold. So when I got my roast chicken before my dining companion got her porchetta, the roast chicken got cold (and the skin less crisp) as the porchetta (and a sandwich were being made). That happened every time.
The bottom line, though, is that what Roast does—namely, roast meats—is very much worth checking out. It is what it does and most of the time it does it really, really well.