stripped-down Sunday roast.

CARVERIES are rarely very good in our experience.

Typically a way of turning out the Sunday roast with the minimum of staff, they tend to be a triumph of quantity over quality.

Diners who get their timing wrong can be presented with frazzled joints of meat, overcooked vegetables and soggy roast potatoes.

So we were rather disappointed to book Sunday lunch at the Arden Arms at Atley Hill, on the road between Daltonon- Tees and Scorton, and to turn up at our chosen time to find that the Sunday lunch offer is exclusively a carvery.

Yes, we could have looked on the pub’s web site which clearly states that is the case, but we also thought it might have been pointed out to us when we booked by telephone the day before.

Our mood was not improved when, at the bar ordering drinks, we were handed two little plastic-covered tokens and pointed to a lengthening queue. We felt like we had collected our tickets for the soup kitchen.

We decided to take a seat at our table and wait for the queue to shorten, except, of course, it didn’t, It got longer.

There’s probably some law relating to queues for food; the hungrier you are, the longer it gets.

At the serving point, it appeared a bit chaotic. The chef wielding the carving knife and fork had to keep pausing as the flow of diners was stopped briefly to wait for more potatoes or carrots brought from the kitchen in a series of frenetic relays.

But the queue did shorten and before long our hunger called us to join the tail, which in fact seemed to move pretty swiftly. It was only a minute or two before we were helping ourselves to roast and boiled potatoes, roast parsnips, carrots, swede, creamed cabbage and broccoli, and the roast meat.

It was well worth the short wait. Clearly one of the benefits of all those journeys from the kitchen was that everything was very fresh. The roast potatoes were still crisp, and chef had managed to achieve that Yorkshire Holy Grail of puddings which were crisp around the edges but still quite light and fluffy in the middle – not an easy thing to do when turning out this number.

The roasts were beef, pork and lamb – supplied by Thompson’s Butchers of Northallerton it later transpired – and we were offered slices of all three. I chose the beef. It was beautifully moist and tender, slightly pink (more well done slices were also available).

Sylvia chose a little of the pork and the lamb and both were of a similar standard to the beef.

Diners are invited to return for second helpings of both meat and vegetables, although the greedy are warned that “wastage will be charged”. Quite how that works in practice was not obvious, but we were not inclined to put the warning to the test. Incidentally, the little carvery tokens we were given at the bar were never collected .

We settled for desserts, an apple tart with custard for Sylvia which was deemed quite good but rather spoilt by being served cold. My lemon tart, served with cream, was acceptable if not especially memorable.

Given that service in a carvery is a necessarily a limited concept, it was hard to make a judgment. The bar staff seemed a little off-hand, but those who brought us desserts were friendly and apologetic about Sylvia’s cold apple tart. I was also irritated that, on paying the bill at the bar, I was initially told the amount verbally, rather than being given an itemised bill.

It rather led to the feeling that such is the popularity of the Arden Arms Sunday lunch – there were an awful lot of people being fed – the operation is geared up to serving people as quickly as possible.

It seems to have become a victim of its undoubted success.

The Arden Arms has been run by Alex and Charlotte Liddle for five years, the couple having rescued it from closure. It’s probably fair to say that the Sunday lunch trade is very different from the evening business when Johnny Edwards, possibly northern North Yorkshire’s most popular – and well travelled – chef holds sway in the kitchen.

If you fancy a carvery, the Arden Arms version is one of the best around, notwithstanding the stripped-down service. It is certainly good value; the as-much-as-you-can-eat meat and veg is £8.95 per person, the desserts £4.95, our total bill with a couple of drinks was £31.30.