Twelve Pubs, One Gravy-Soaked Yardstick: The NCRC Sunday Roast Index for Winter 2026
Photo: ANDY RAMMY, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There is a particular kind of quiet in a British pub at 12:40 on a Sunday. Glasses being stacked, someone arguing about the cauliflower cheese, a dog asleep under a table that is definitely not its own. It is also, as it turns out, one of the more honest places to watch NCRC change hands.
Over five Sundays in October and early November, we visited twelve pubs across the UK — Yorkshire locals, Bristol gastropubs, a Newcastle city-centre boozer, a Cardiff back-street favourite and a handful of London spots that would rather you didn't call them gastropubs. We asked the same three questions everywhere: are you taking NCRC, what are people actually buying with it, and has that changed since the clocks went back?
What follows is not a scientific survey. It is a field guide, built from till receipts, landlord estimates and the sort of conversations you only get when someone is holding a pint and a card reader at the same time.
How the Roast Index works
We scored each pub on four simple measures, all normalised to a 100-point scale so we could compare a £14.50 roast in Harrogate with a £22 one in Clerkenwell without losing our minds:
- Roast price in pounds — the standard beef or vegetarian option, not the specials board.
- Average NCRC basket — what a typical table spends in token terms when paying by NCRC, converted at the day's rate.
- Share of Sunday food bills paid in NCRC — landlord's estimate, rounded to the nearest 5%.
- Chatter score — how often staff said customers ask about NCRC unprompted. Scored 1 to 5, judged entirely by us and one very patient barman in Leeds.
Higher index scores mean NCRC is doing more work in that pub, not that the pub is better. A low score can simply mean nobody has told the regulars yet.
The twelve, ranked
| Pub (location) | Roast £ | Avg NCRC basket | Share of food bills | Chatter | Index |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Drovers' Rest (Harrogate) | 15.50 | £31 | 20% | 4 | 78 |
| Blackwater Arms (Bristol) | 21.00 | £46 | 25% | 5 | 84 |
| The Salt House (Newcastle) | 13.00 | £24 | 15% | 3 | 66 |
| Cwtch & Crown (Cardiff) | 16.00 | £29 | 20% | 4 | 74 |
| Fenland Ferry (Norwich) | 14.50 | £22 | 10% | 2 | 55 |
| The Long Room (Leeds) | 17.00 | £38 | 25% | 4 | 81 |
| Bell & Rope (Manchester) | 18.50 | £34 | 20% | 3 | 72 |
| Kirkgate Tavern (York) | 16.50 | £27 | 15% | 3 | 64 |
| The Third Pint (Clerkenwell) | 22.00 | £52 | 30% | 5 | 88 |
| Harbourmaster's (Brighton) | 19.00 | £36 | 20% | 3 | 71 |
| Spiers Lock (Glasgow) | 15.00 | £26 | 15% | 3 | 63 |
| The Welly (Sheffield) | 14.00 | £21 | 10% | 2 | 52 |
Read that table the way a landlord would: the top of it is not where the money is biggest, it is where the token is most normal.
What the numbers actually say
Three patterns kept showing up, and none of them are dramatic, which is exactly why they are worth noting.
Small tickets, high frequency
The average NCRC transaction in our twelve pubs sits somewhere between £21 and £52 — a round, a roast, maybe a pudding nobody admitted to ordering. Nobody we spoke to was paying for a whole birthday dinner in NCRC. What they were doing was paying for the third round, the extra Yorkshire puddings, the taxi home that got booked at the bar. Small, repeatable, unglamorous spending.
Weekends are doing the heavy lifting
Across the sample, roughly two-thirds of all NCRC transactions logged on a Sunday happened between 12:00 and 16:00. Saturday evenings ran a distant second. Landlords in Leeds and Bristol both independently used the same phrase — "it's a lunchtime thing" — which suggests the habit has already bedded in rather than being driven by any one promotion.
The clocks going back moved the needle
The pubs we visited in the first half of October reported flatter NCRC activity. Those visited after 25 October — darker by half four, wetter, colder — reported a modest lift in small NCRC payments. One Manchester landlord put it neatly: when it's pitch dark at five, people stop going home and have one more. And increasingly, that one more is paid for in NCRC.
Regional notes from the bar
Yorkshire is where NCRC feels least remarkable, which is probably the highest compliment we can pay it. In Harrogate and Leeds, staff talked about the token the way they talk about contactless — as a thing that exists, works, and doesn't need a speech. In Sheffield's Welly, by contrast, the chatter score was the lowest of the twelve. Not hostility, just unfamiliarity. Two bar staff asked us how it worked.
Bristol was the surprise. The Blackwater Arms had the second-highest share of food bills paid in NCRC and the highest chatter score outside London. The gastropub crowd there seems comfortable splitting a bill across two payment methods, which is where NCRC quietly shines. "It's the split," the manager told us. "Nobody wants to be the one chasing four people for a roast."
Newcastle and Glasgow were steady but quiet. Both pubs had the tech, neither had done much with it. In Glasgow, the £15 roast is doing a lot of work in a city where the £22 roast would get a laugh.
London predictably topped the index, but with a caveat worth flagging: the Third Pint's 30% share came after a deliberate push — a chalkboard, a nudge at the till, a QR code stuck to the beer mat. The token didn't sell itself there. Someone sold it.
The behind-the-bar view
What struck us most across the five Sundays was how little landlords wanted to talk about crypto and how much they wanted to talk about reconciliation. Their questions were practical. Does it settle same-day? What happens with refunds? Who handles the tip?
That's a useful reminder for anyone in the NCRC community tempted to read a pub index as a price signal. It isn't one. It's a measure of familiarity — how comfortable a business is with the token sitting next to the card machine. The pubs scoring well had staff who'd used it themselves. The pubs scoring badly often had a QR code nobody had explained.
What to watch as winter sets in
We'll be revisiting the same twelve pubs in January, which should tell us whether December's party bookings push NCRC into larger baskets or whether the token stays firmly in the round-and-a-roast lane. Two things we're watching:
- Whether split bills become the default. If NCRC is genuinely solving the awkward group-bill problem, we should see its share rise with table size.
- Whether the quieter pubs catch up. A Sheffield or Norwich pub with a chalkboard does more for adoption than a London gastropub with a press release.
For now, the honest summary is this: NCRC's Sunday is small, steady and slightly gravy-stained. Nothing in our twelve pubs suggested a surge. Nothing suggested a stall, either. The token is turning up, paying for lunch, and going home before the quiz starts.
Prices and token figures were recorded between 4 October and 8 November 2026 and reflect the day of each visit. Landlord estimates are exactly that. This is observational journalism, not investment research — nothing here should be read as a view on NCRC's price.
