One Sunday, Two Roasts.
Why the only thing better than eating a roast is watching your friends get roasted.
Sunday, 1st February 2026
Lower Manhattan, NY
New York is a city that is constantly trying to convince you that you are alone. It does this by surrounding you with eight million people who are either looking at their phones or screaming obscenities at a pigeon the size of a Camry. To survive here, you don’t just find an apartment; you have to find a family. This past Sunday, I realised over these 11 years in NYC, I’ve somehow managed to stumble into two of them.
The day began with the First Roast: the culinary kind. I headed to Old Mate’s, which is currently the only Australian pub in Manhattan and therefore the only place in the five boroughs where you’ll find both chicken salt and Gundagai lamb on the menu.
I was there with my “pickleball family” -a group that meets weekly to smack a plastic ball around, even (and especially) when the temperature suggests we should be hibernating. And yes, we have a uniform. What of it?
The crew includes my friend Hannah Pham and her slightly less cool husband, Ronny Chieng. You might know Ronny from being a globally famous comedian and movie star, but on Sundays, he is mostly just the guy Hannah has to ask, “Why are you papping a punnet of avocados? And where did you even find a disposable camera? Why are you wearing a tie?”
The roast lamb (the national meat of Australia) was perfect. We knocked back South Australian Shiraz and surrounded ourselves with a cast of characters that only Manhattan could assemble: Michelin star chefs, Hollywood stuntmen (and women), screenwriters, seafood distributors, actors, comedians, and at one point, Simu Liu, the star of Shang-Chi and Barbie: two of the most different films ever. He just wandered in. That is the thing about this city; you can be eating a roasted pumpkin, and suddenly Ken is sitting behind you, talking shit about Rush Hour 4.
But the celebrity wasn’t the point. The point was the noise. The clinking of forks, the yelling and laughing, the specific, warm chaos of a family roast that makes you forget you’re 10,000 miles from Perth. Sunday roasts were a fun tradition in my family back home; some of my best memories growing up are at Sunday roasts, with my grandpa perfectly delivering slightly inappropriate jokes over dessert. (and killing).
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Then came the Second Roast: the verbal kind.
As the sun went down, I took myself (and my full stomach) over to Lucky Jack’s on the Lower East Side with my much better-looking partner in crime, who is also a comedian. We were there for a Roast Battle- THE Roast battle: Comedy Fight Club.
Ten years ago, my “comedy family” used to meet in the dank basement of a bar called Lovecraft on Avenue C. It was H.P. Lovecraft-themed, which meant we told jokes surrounded by Eldritch horror and iffy plumbing. The tradition was simple: after the shows, we would emotionally dismantle one another for sport, and stream it on Periscope (remember Periscope? Bless.) Since then, it has moved to several clubs and bars, but mostly lives here in the LES.
It had been a while since I’d been to a roast, but the muscle memory kicked in immediately. That specific intimacy of a comedy roast, where you can’t really hurt someone that deeply unless you know them well. The best roasts -the ones that make the room gasp and then explode- come from a place of deep, twisted affection. It is a “fight club” where the first rule is no pity claps. You say the worst possible thing, and then you go lower. And if the audience doesn’t laugh, you die.
Watching my comedian friends on stage at Lucky Jack’s, tearing shreds off each other with surgical precision, I felt the same warmth I’d felt at lunch. It was a different kind of love language; one involved gravy, the other involved incendiary jokes about someone’s failed relationship, but it was love nonetheless.
