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The 12 Best Cities for a Proper Sunday Roast or Its Local Equivalent
Every culture has its version of the slow Sunday meal — the one that runs for hours and ends with everyone too full to move. These are the best cities for Sunday lunch, and the dish to order in each.
The best meal I had last year wasn’t in a restaurant with a star. It was a Sunday lunch in Rome that started at one and finished, somehow, at five — plates that kept coming, a grandmother refilling wine before I’d noticed it was low, an argument about football that nobody actually cared about winning. I left so full I had to sit on a wall for ten minutes. And I thought: this is the thing. This is what the best cities for Sunday lunch all understand. The slow weekend meal isn’t about the food alone. It’s about the hours.
So here’s where to do it properly, and what to order when you get there.
The one rule of the Sunday meal
Don’t schedule anything after it. I mean this. The whole point is that it expands to fill the afternoon. Treat it like an appointment that has no end time, go hungry, and don’t you dare ask for the bill early. The locals will clock it instantly.
1. London, England
The Sunday roast in its homeland. Beef, lamb, or pork, roast potatoes that should be crispy outside and fluffy in, a Yorkshire pudding the size of your face, gravy, the lot. The gastropub does it best — somewhere like The Camberwell Arms or the Canton Arms. Book it, because every Londoner with a hangover wants the same table. Around £20-25 for the works.
2. Rome, Italy
The Sunday pranzo is sacred. Families pack the trattorie of Trastevere and Testaccio, and the classic Roman order is whatever the day’s pasta is followed by abbacchio (roast lamb). Go to a proper old-school place — Da Enzo, if you can stand the queue — and just keep saying yes. Lunch here is a marathon, not a sprint.
3. Lyon, France
France’s food capital does the long déjeuner like nowhere else, in the bouchons — small, old, gloriously unfussy bistros. Sunday lunch is quenelles, poulet de Bresse, things drowned in cream and butter, and it goes on and on. Lyon doesn’t do light. Embrace it.
4. Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Sunday asado is the heart of Argentine life. Long, smoky, beef-heavy, and ideally in someone’s backyard — but the parrillas do a fine public version. Don Julio in Palermo is the famous one (book weeks ahead). The meal moves slowly through cut after cut. Pace yourself. Trust me.
5. Lisbon, Portugal
Sunday is for the slow tasca lunch and, often, cozido à portuguesa — a vast boiled meat and vegetable spread that’s pure comfort. The old neighbourhood tascas up in Graça or Mouraria do it best, and cheapest. Add a vinho verde and the afternoon just dissolves.
6. New Orleans, USA
The Sunday tradition here is unique — red beans and rice (technically a Monday dish, but the weekend long lunch culture is rich) and, above all, jazz brunch. Commander’s Palace does the famous one, with a band weaving between tables. It’s slow, boozy, joyful Southern hospitality, and it eats a whole afternoon happily.
7. Munich, Germany
The Bavarian Sunday is built around the Weisswurst breakfast (eaten before noon, traditionally) sliding into a long beer-garden lunch — roast pork, dumplings, pretzels, litre steins. The communal benches of a Biergarten mean you’ll end up talking to strangers. That’s the design. Augustiner-Keller is a beauty.
8. Marrakech, Morocco
Friday, not Sunday, is the holy day here, and the ritual meal is couscous — a vast steaming mound of it with seven vegetables and tender meat, shared from one platter. Eaten with family after prayers. Some riads will host you for it; ask. It’s communal eating in its oldest, warmest form.
9. Vienna, Austria
The Sunday Tafelspitz — boiled beef with horseradish and apple, the dish Emperor Franz Joseph supposedly ate constantly — is the classic, served in old-world restaurants like Plachutta where it arrives as a whole ceremony of broth, marrow, and meat in stages. Slow, rich, deeply Habsburg.
10. Mexico City, Mexico
Sunday lunch (la comida) is the big meal of the day all week, but Sunday stretches it. Carnitas, barbacoa, mole on a good day, and a long table of family. The fondas and the markets do it with no pretension at all. Find a busy local spot and follow the crowd.
11. Seoul, South Korea
The Korean equivalent is the big shared table — Korean BBQ where you grill at your own table for hours, or a sprawling spread of jjigae and a dozen banchan side dishes. It’s loud, social, and endless. Go with a group; this is not a meal for one.
12. Dublin, Ireland
Back to the roast, with a Guinness instead of a Yorkshire. The Sunday carvery and the gastropub roast are institutions, and the unhurried Irish version comes with conversation that outlasts the plates. Somewhere like The Old Spot does it right. The chat is half the meal.
How to do it like you belong
Reserve where you can — the good Sunday tables go fast everywhere. Show up hungry, properly hungry. Order what the table next to you is having if you’re stuck. Drink what the locals drink with it. And clear the afternoon, because the single biggest mistake travellers make is treating this as lunch when it’s really the whole event. The eating slows down. The talking doesn’t.
Book the table, skip breakfast, and give the afternoon away — the slow Sunday meal pays you back every minute you let it have.
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