Wetherspoons Christmas food reviewed: ‘Gravy as sweet as Ribena’

Reviewing the Wetherspoons Christmas lunch is fraught. If you say it tastes like satan himself has emptied his sulphurous bowels onto your plate, it betrays a degree of classism, even if it happens to be true. 

If you do the opposite, claiming to have enjoyed whatever is sluiced before you, say that you would gladly drag your family to Spoons every day for the rest of their miserable lives, it comes across as reverse snobbery, which is somehow even worse.

Thankfully I fell somewhere in the middle, neither loving nor hating but rather tolerating it, deriving neither pleasure nor pain. It was a Wetherspoons Christmas lunch and that’s really all you need to know.

The real winner here is your wallet. At £16 for a Christmas meal and a pint, you’re only really paying £11 for the dinner itself and in this economy that’s a steal. There are Christmas dinners being sold for hundreds of pounds out there and this is absolutely not one of them. 

Best bits

Outside it’s raining, the sky is an impressive shade of grey. Inside Spoons, everything is spectacular. Three tables within ten metres of me are wearing Christmas jumpers. It’s 4 December. 

The food was not the best bit, rather it’s there to give my mouth something to do during all my enjoyment of the festive environment.

I have no doubt the turkey slices on this massive plate are of the boil in the bag variety and honestly, for £11 excluding drinks, I’m not complaining. It was perfectly adequate, absolutely edible, stupendously standard. The peas tasted of peas, having that brittle pop that frozen peas do, an explosive moment of  joy for the mouth when the vegetables are pressed between tongue and mouthtop. The pigs in blankets were diminutive but were crispy enough and tasted alright. There was a fairly sizable ball of stuffing, although it had a vague air of the sawmill to it.

Plus you get a decent pint like a Punk IPA or a Stella, a couple of which would cost you the whole price of a Christmas dinner anywhere else.

The real killer was the gravy: as sweet as Ribena, it was drizzled all over everything, giving each item – peas, potatoes, turkey – the same cloying taste

The worst bits

The real killer was the gravy: as sweet as Ribena, it was drizzled all over everything, giving each item – peas, potatoes, turkey – the same cloying taste, like a dessert crafted exclusively from meat and vegetables. A surfeit of gravy is a smart idea, warding against that most common criticism of Christmas dinner: that it’s too dry. But this isn’t the solution.

There was also a strange, seemingly arbitrary distribution of ingredients. I found a single 4cm baton of parsnip lurking beneath a dollop of mashed potatoes the size of Santa’s beard (is mash Christmassy, though?). There are two miserly pigs in blankets but more peas than you could reasonably want. There was a decent amount of turkey but far too much cranberry sauce, although in fairness that’s served in its own ramekin so you can ignore most of it. Love it or hate it, Wetherspoons will always exist so it’s time to form an opinion on their Christmas dinner.