It’s 1pm on Friday afternoon and scores of people are queueing patiently outside a small cafe in the shadow of York Minster. The York Roast Co usually specialises in pork sandwiches and roast dinners, but today the crowds are here to sample the business’s surprise new hit – the yorkshire pudding wrap.
The delicacy consists of a large flattened yorkshire pudding, wrapped around a mound of carved meat, stuffing and some token veg, smothered in a thick gravy. It is, as one customer describes it, “the ultimate comfort food”.
The past week has seen the morsel become a social media sensation. On Tuesday, the company posted a picture on their Facebook page of the wrap glistening seductively with gravy. That post, which has had over 30,000 shares, was spotted by the BBC, who on Wednesday published a short video online of the wrap being prepared with the bucolic tones of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony – the music from the Hovis ad.
That video has had 12m views on the BBC’s Facebook page at the time of writing, 11m more than a clip of Donald Trump’s threat to meet North Korea with “fire and fury”.
It has been a surprising week for Wayne Chadwick, managing director of York Roast Co. He has had to take on extra staff in his shop on York’s historic Low Petergate. “We really weren’t expecting this,” he says, taking delivery of 200 extra kilos of pork to meet the increased demand.
“We’re getting a lot of students coming in,” he says. “They want to be able to tell their mums that they’ve had their Sunday dinner. It is essentially a Sunday dinner in a wrap.”
In many ways the yorkshire pudding wrap tastes exactly as you’d expect it to. The yorkshire pudding is pleasantly greasy, the portion of meat generous and the gravy thick and salty. It leaves you feeling satisfied, if slightly guilty. As Ashley Mand, a local estate agent queueing for his lunch, says, it is not really the sort of thing you’d have more than once a week.
When the business first started selling the wrap in March it made up around 20% of sales. This week that figure is over 70%, and Chadwick now has plans to take the wrap nationwide.
Alongside the two branches in York, the York Roast Co has shops in Chester, Shrewsbury and Salisbury, but Chadwick wants to expand to other tourist hotspots, including Oxford, Cambridge and Bath.
And why stop with the UK? “Somebody from Perth in Australia emailed to say ‘any chance of opening a franchise?’,” he says. “The Chinese, the Japanese, the Americans, they all want to try a yorkshire pudding.”
Sitting down to enjoy their long awaited wraps, 35-year-old payroll clerk Stuart Peers and 34-year-old accountant Stephen Haggan stop first to take pictures of their meals to post to social media. The self-described foodies have come through from Manchester for the day, a one-and-a-half-hour train journey, in part because of the lure of the wrap.
“The yorkshire pudding is nicer than having bread, I think,” says Peers. “Sometimes when you get a carvery meat sandwich it’s a bit boring because it’s just the meat on its own, but this is like a whole roast dinner.”
“We’ve got a friend in Australia who has tagged himself [underneath the video on Facebook] saying ‘I need this in my life’,” Peers adds. “We’ve messaged him just now just to wind him up.”
Working behind the counter, frantically flattening yorkshire puddings and making wraps, Scott Bastiman looks a bit despairing. He says the team made more than 1,000 wraps on Thursday and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get quieter today. He says plaintively: “Why did this have to go viral?”
Additional reporting: Imogen Cooper
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion