The Lord Palmerston 1

On Sunday, the first sunny and warm(ish) day of the year Thomas and I had a nice local pub lunch and the obligatory jug of pimms sitting in the sun.

The Lord Palmerston is a delightfully quaint little place, situated at the top of Dartmouth Park Hill, a stones throw away from Tufnell Park tube station. Last summer we were frequent visitors but it lost it’s appeal to us throughout the winter months due to our associating it with al fresco activities. We plonked ourselves down in the prime sun spot on a bench out front and were envied by the bar staff, one declaring to me that this would be his exact way to spend the day were he not working.


How wrong we were though to discount the inside areas. When the air turned chilly we ventured in and around the corner from the bar there’s a brilliant little area where one can enjoy the Sunday Paper and a glass of whatever. Our chosen tipple was Pimms, though they were lacking the fruit to make it as good as it should be. We lounged on a beaten up old leather couch for a couple of hours and were pleased to find a very cute downstairs dining room and a lovely wooden panelled, creaky floor boarded function room upstairs which would happily seat around 30 people. I’ll bare this in mind for future events for sure.

Whilst basking in the sun (well sort of, we ignored the cold breeze for as long as we possibly could) we both enjoyed the Roast Loin of Pork with mixed vegetables, roast potatoes and apple and cinnamon sauce.


I loved the vegetable selection, each cooked perfectly, with just the right amount of bite and the apple sauce with it’s pleasant and warming hit of cinnamon. The whole thing was perhaps under seasoned though and lacked oomph. The potatoes were okay, they looked good, crisp on the outside but were perhaps a little too hard on the inside.

I felt the dish was a bit cold, this can possibly be down to the fact that we were eating outside so I won’t hold that against them. We both wished we had opted for roast beef in the end. Alfie, a well behaved dog with a group of people at a nearby table, certainly seemed mightily impressed with the aroma of it as plate after plate wafted through the bar!

The service here can be slightly prickly, depending on who is serving you, there’s a definite sense of ‘i’m so much better than this’ with some of the staff but they probably are so who am I to complain. It seems to be the type of place where regulars are a combination of lone diners who like that they are unpestered or groups of young people who are well acquainted with the place and the owners. This is certainly the case of a Sunday it seems.

Now, I wish to cast no aspersions when I say both Thomas and I were very ill that same evening. It might have been my experiment with homemade meringues which unfortunately were undercooked, in that they were more like lemon meringue pie in consistency than pavlova. That aside, we shall return to the Lord Palmerston in future, if for no other reason than the mean jugs of pimms.

The Lord Palmerston
33 Dartmouth Park Hill, NW5
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