Middle Class Problems: Why can't pubs cope with the Sunday lunch rush?

Daisy Stenham's weekends have been marred by a lack of roast beef and purple sprouting broccoli

(Corbis)

Cinemas don't run out of popcorn. Theatres don't run out of ice cream. Football stadia don't run out of Stella. Yet twice recently I have fallen victim to the unscrupulous closing of a pub kitchen during the peak mania of the Sunday lunch rush.

Is it that I'm going to the wrong pubs, perhaps? Rather than a countryside carvery, I've been spending my weekends frustrated at London gastropubs apparently unable to order in enough roast beef and purple sprouting broccoli to placate the labrador-walking masses.

What's worse, it's not as though single dishes were simply removed from the menu – the entire kitchens have been shut down, with an air of gravity – "I'm sorry, we just couldn't cope" – that would normally be reserved for situations of actual danger.

It's bad enough to be left starving – but having to stomach others' complaints as well, not to mention demands for bread and olives, the ordering of bags of Tyrrells crisps by the dozen – well, it's all a bit much for a lazy afternoon.

And, as ever-more glasses of Merlot are drained, the more theatrical the huffing and tutting that echoes around the pub, the more wounded people look when staff pass them, the more it's no longer an environment you particularly want to be around.

The only solution: to give up on this travesty and, next week, to install ourselves in the pub early and smile knowingly to ourselves as all those artisan-coffee drinking latecomers who've been out walking their French bulldogs enter to their own fresh hell.