Beyrouths

Address: 73 Bedford Hill, SW12 9HA
Website: http://beyrouths.com/
Nearest tube station: Balham

We should really have called this blog BYO Balham, such is the number of bring-your-own restaurants in our local area. We’ve already covered Tagine, Krua and Paddyfield (and the Monday night BYO deal at the now-closed Poulet Rouge), and still have a few more to go…

And so we come to Beyrouths, a Lebanese mini-chain with branches in Balham, Streatham, Wimbledon and Upper Street, Islington. The Balham restaurant has quite a stark interior, including a fixed staircase made with scaffold poles (it’s a lot more secure than that makes it sound). There are a relatively small number of tables on the ground floor, but plenty more downstairs.

We visited for an early dinner one Friday night, around 7pm, and were the only people in the restaurant for a while. As the evening went on, the other tables on the ground floor filled up with a mix of couples and groups of friends, eager to take advantage of the BYO policy – there was a good number of corks being popped on the other tables.

We decided to share a selection of meze, rather than take a main dish from the grill. We had hummus awarma – hummus with bread, improved no end by the inclusion of chunks of diced lamb – and baba ghanouj – an excellent version of the aubergine dip, served with bread too. We also had the halloum meshwi, which is exactly what it sounds like: halloumi. I think meshwi must mean “non-squeaky” because this was a tasty cheese which wasn’t like the rubbery, squeaky halloumi I’ve had in other restaurants.

Judging from the choice on the menu, I think it’s fair to say that the Lebanese like lamb, but, luckily, so do we. We rounded off the dinner with kibbeh – lamb and cracked wheat meatballs, which were a bit dry for my liking; sambousak – mini, fried pastries, not unlike a little Cornish pasty or an empanada, filled with lamb, which I thought were excellent; and arayes – a type of flatbread stuffed with lamb. As the flatbread was grilled, and the meat not directly cooked, the lamb was a bit too pink, though it was very tasty.

The menu on Beyrouths’ website shows one bottle of white wine as the only alcohol on offer. In the Balham restaurant, the menu has five or so red wines and the same number of whites, plus two types of beer. We brought our own (as would only seem right, given the aim of this blog…), for a corkage of £2 per person.

The meal came to £33 for two, including corkage but excluding service – which is not automatically added.

If you’ve read our other Balham blog posts, you’ll already know where to get your booze – We Brought Beer in Hildreth Street Market, Sainsbury’s opposite the station or Waitrose at the top of Bedford Hill.

Pappa Ciccia

Address: 41 Fulham High Street, London SW6 3JJ
Website: http://www.pappaciccia.com
Nearest tube station: Putney Bridge

It’s pretty unusual to find an Italian restaurant that is BYO – mainly, I guess, because there are so many good Italian wines that the restaurants want to serve. However, we’ve managed to find a couple: Anima E Cuore in Kentish Town – which we haven’t visited yet – and Pappa Ciccia, a family-run restaurant, with two branches in Fulham and one just across the river in Putney.

We visited the Fulham High Street restaurant for a bite to eat after work in September, and were lucky enough to grab the last table for an early dinner – among lots of families finishing their early dinners. As the evening went on, the family crowd disappeared and was replaced by couples and groups of friends.

Pappa Ciccia is actually a fully-licensed restaurant, which also has a BYO policy every day. The only restriction is that you can’t BYO if there are more than eight people at a table, unless booked or agreed with the restaurant.

To start, we shared a melanzane parmigiana, which was an excellent example of the dish. This is often a soggy mess in restaurants, but not this one. It was also huge – I’m not sure we’d have made it past the main courses if we’d each had a starter.

For the mains, Mrs BYO had a campagnola pizza, topped with mixed peppers and chicken breast marinated in balsamic vinegar. A delicate flavour but really tasty.

I had a mezza luna – which translates as ‘half moon’ and is so named for its shape  – but could also accurately describe its size. It was STUFFED with mozzarella, ham, mushrooms and pepperoni. It was so good that I was determined to get through it, but I had to concede defeat a few mouthfuls before the end, fearing that I wouldn’t be able to walk back to the tube otherwise…

The good thing is that if you can’t manage it all, they have takeaway boxes and are happy to box up your leftover pizzas to take home. Mrs BYO’s campagnola did her for lunch the next day.

One starter and two mains came to £50.46, including corkage of £4 per person and 12.5% service charge (which is automatically added).

There are a few corner shops on Fulham High Street for buying your booze – or why not take a bottle of nice Italian wine that you bought on holiday and have been saving for a special occasion?

Panda Dim Sum Cafe

Address: 767 High Road, Leytonstone, London E11 4QS
Website: None that we could find…
Nearest tube station: Leytonstone

Being in the East End after the trial of watching West Ham lose at home (again), Mrs BYO, mother-in-law and I were in need of some refreshments, so we headed over to nearby Leytonstone to visit Panda Dim Sum Cafe.

Panda Dim Sum Cafe was recently covered in Time Out's Leytonstone feature, and the clue to this place is in its name - it's a cafe which serves dim sum. And, it should go without saying, it has a BYO policy...

The menu is broken down into sections – steamed dim sum, fried dim sum, soups, noodle and rice dishes, and special house dishes.

Between the three of us, we ordered prawn dumplings, char sui buns and broccoli from the steamed section, and pork and Chinese leaf dumplings and chicken and Chinese mushrooms dumplings from the fried menu.

The dim sum comes in portions of three or four pieces – perfect for trying other people’s food, but difficult if the number of pieces isn’t divisible by the number of people at the table!

The food comes out as it’s ready – which is quite slowly – but is worth the wait. This is really good dim sum. The char sui buns were my favourites by far – pork enveloped by a fluffy bread-like bun. Unfortunately, we were given two lots of the pork and Chinese leaf dumplings, rather than one lot of chicken and Chinese mushrooms. Luckily, the dumplings we were given were good enough to eat in double the volume.

For dessert, one has to head back into the jumble of the menu and look at the sweet dishes tucked away among the steamed dim sum. We had Cantonese sponge cake and coconut buns. Just as strangely as the location of the desserts in the menu, we weren’t offered new plates or chop sticks for the dessert, and had to ask for these – we didn’t think a soy sauce stained plate would really work with coconut buns…

I’ve never had a dessert in a Chinese restaurant before, but these hit the spot: the sponge cake was surprisingly light, and quickly polished off despite the size, and the coconut buns were brilliantly sweet.

The cost for the three of us was £25.70. Yes, that's the total price for three people for food and soft drinks, but excluding a service charge which is not automatically added. This place is seriously good value.

The quality of the food and the price make this a place to which we’d come back again, despite the somewhat haphazard service. If all you’ve tried before is dim sum in the likes of Ping Pong, you’re going to be amazed how good the food here is.

For your proper drinks, there’s a corner shop on the, erm, corner opposite, and a Sainsbury’s local on the way from Leytonstone train station (under a five minute walk).

The Paddyfield

Address: 4 Bedford Hill, London SW12 9RG
Website: None that I could find…
Nearest tube: Balham

We stopped off for a quick after-work dinner at The Paddyfield, a Vietnamese/Thai restaurant in Balham.

It was surprisingly busy for a Wednesday night, with lots of walk-ins – and also a woman who could probably lay claim to having the loudest, fakest laugh in the world. Thankfully, she had been seated in the far corner of the room (so, even before giving us the menus, the staff got bonus marks from me for putting her there). The restaurant is rather tile-filled (including the table tops) and so there isn’t much to absorb sound, making it quite noisy. Maybe it’s not so bad when there isn’t a drunk hyena there…

Anyway, to the food. For starters, we shared Vietnamese prawn crackers, giant, pinkish crackers, with a faint taste of prawns and a bit of spice to them. More spice could be obtained from the accompanying chilli dip and chopped chillies. Needless to say, I didn’t trouble either of those.

I had a chicken pad thai for my main. This comprised chicken (obviously), Thai rice noodles, bean sprouts and spring onion, mixed with cooked egg (a bit like an Asian spaghetti carbonara, perhaps?), and sprinkled with crushed peanuts. It was served with a wedge of lime and a spicy dip.

At first, I wasn’t convinced I had made the best choice, as there wasn’t a great deal of flavour. However, as I worked through the dish – which was piled up on the plate – with more room to mix the different layers, and giving it a good squeeze of lime, I ended up really enjoying it.

Really, I should have started with what Mrs BYO had to eat, as her main course arrived a good five minutes before mine. She had beef xao sa: beef marinated in lemon grass, chilli and garlic, served with vermicelli noodles and mixed salad leaves. The portion didn’t look huge when it arrived, but it was surprisingly filling. Mrs BYO thoroughly enjoyed her main too.

The bill came to £31.62, which included service and two soft drinks. Corkage is £2. Ironically, given the blog’s name, we didn’t BYO. If we had done, the bill would have been £27.25 without any soft drinks.

The restaurant does not take cards, but doesn’t warn about this until the bill arrives. Luckily, there is an HSBC with a cash machine a couple of doors down, and I noticed that I wasn’t the only diner who had to pop out to get some cash to settle up.

So, the restaurant is pretty basic and the service a bit hit-and-miss – but luckily, the food they dished up made it worth it.

The Paddyfield is across the main road from a large Waitrose and around the corner from an even-larger Sainsbury’s, plus there’s an Oddbins on the way from Balham tube and the We Brought Beer craft ale shop on Hildreth Street Market.

Cah Chi

Address: 394 Garratt Lane, London SW18 4HP
Website: www.cahchi.com [Broken as at the time of writing]
Nearest station: Earlsfield

For our latest instalment, we visited Cah Chi, a Korean restaurant in Earlsfield. There is also a sister branch in Raynes Park.

Knowing that Cah Chi does not take cards, we headed straight from the railway station to an ATM at Barclays bank, just across the road and a few doors away from the restaurant. Not having brought any drink with us, we strolled down the road, past Cah Chi, looking for somewhere to buy a bottle – and failed. We then headed back up past the station, still unable to find any corner shop open. It was only then that we saw a Sainsbury's Local around the corner from the station and an alcohol-selling corner shop further up the road, which we had missed on our walk to the bank. Luckily, I already had an appointment booked at the optician for the following day…

We had arrived in Earlsfield rather early but these distractions had eaten up some time and we arrived at the restaurant on the dot of our booking. And I’d recommend making one – there wasn't a spare table to be seen and walk-ins were being turned away.

Before our starters arrived, four small plates were delivered to our table, compliments of the kitchen: a ball of cold mashed potato containing diced vegetables (surprisingly nice), two quarters of a boiled egg in soy sauce (ditto), kim chi and caramelised soy beans (extremely moreish, but not particularly easy to eat with chopsticks).

Next up were our starters, gun-mandu – five crispy homemade pork and vegetable dumplings with a soy dip on the side – and kkanpunggi – a generous portion of delicious chunks of deep-friend chicken with honey and garlic. The chicken was perfectly cooked and incredibly hot (temperature-wise, not spiciness).

For our mains, I went for the bulgogi, thin slices of beef cooked on a little barbeque on the table. In addition to the sliced beef, there are a number of barbeque dishes to choose from, including spare rib, pork and chicken. Unlike many Korean restaurants, the meat was cooked for us by a member of staff, rather than us being left to our own devices.

There are a number of optional side dishes which can be ordered with the barbeque dishes, including sliced mushrooms, onions and beansprouts. I went with the sang chu and pa sengs che: fresh lettuce with shredded spring onion and a dollop of spicy paste on the side. The staff show how it’s done – take a lettuce leaf, add some spring onion, some beef and a touch of the paste – and the whole parcel can be eaten in one.


Mrs BYO had her Korean favourite, a chicken bibimbap. And it didn't disappoint – just the right spiciness, and bursting with freshness and flavour. They even took the fried egg off the top, much to Mrs BYO's joy (she is not an egg person).

As a shared side, we had the gaji gui, grilled aubergine covered in a sweet miso sauce, something which we both really like. This one did not disappoint, though it was perhaps unnecessary on top of all the other food we’d ordered.


To drink, we had a bargainous bottle of Clearspring sauvignon blanc from Sainsbury's for £6 (which, from looking around the restaurant, was a popular choice with my fellow cheapskates), and Mrs BYO had two apple juices (£2.50 each). The corkage is a rather cheeky £4, though a total of £10 for a bottle of wine in a restaurant is still cheap. The restaurant is BYO wine only.

The bill came to £56.87, including a 10% service charge, which is automatically added.

Mrs BYO and I both agree that this is the best BYO we've visited so far. We’re definitely going back, armed with cash and our new-found knowledge of where to get our drink…
 

Krua

Address: 90 Bedford Hill, Balham SW12 9HR
Website: None that I could find…
Nearest tube: Balham

An after-work stroll on Friday evening took us in search of a Thai BYO restaurant.

Our first stop was The Paddyfield on Bedford Hill in Balham – which turned out to be closed for refurbishment. So we continued on to Krua, also on Bedford Hill, heading towards Streatham.

On the ground floor, Krua has a BYO restaurant; downstairs was the not-entirely-authentic-sounding Sean’s Thai Bar (the last night of which was the night that we visited Krua), which served Thai snacks and cocktails. As this was a BYO night, we plumped for dinner in the restaurant.

For starters, we shared chicken satay and gyoza. The chicken skewers were cooked perfectly, not the least bit dry, a problem I often find, and with a satay sauce that suited me very well but could have had a bit more spice for Mrs BYO. The gyoza were vegetarian and crispy – I’m guessing deep-fried, rather than boiled or pan-fried. Both came with a pile of leaves and grated carrot.

For our mains, we both picked from the special dishes on the menu. I chose tamarind duck with a side portion of sticky rice, only remembering when it arrived that I had had duck at a food market that lunch time. Poor ducks. The trouble is they taste so good, especially, it turns out, when cooked with tamarind, which gave the dish a lovely warm flavour. The duck was served with chunks of onion and red and green pepper, all covered in sauce.

Mrs BYO had the catchily-named gai yang som tum khao niew. I’d recommend pointing at it on the menu if you want to order it. The dish is a typical regional Thai dish, comprising a grilled chicken and papaya salad, served with sticky rice (you don’t need to order this separately) and a sweet chilli dip. It was fresh, not too heavy and came with a bit of a kick.

Sadly, no desserts were on offer, though we could have fitted one in – the starters and mains weren’t small but were quite light, so there was certainly scope for something more.

Corkage is £1 and a bottle of tap water is provided on each table.

Our meal – two starters, two mains, one side dish and two cans of Coke (£2 each) – came to a very reasonable £37.50, without service. 

For your booze, there is a Costcutter next door and a big Sainsbury’s opposite Balham station.

Tagine

Address: 3 Fernlea Road, Balham SW12 9RT
Website: http://www.zizoutagine.com/
Nearest tube: Balham

We last ate at Tagine, a North African restaurant in Balham, about two-and-a-half years ago, when we had dinner with a friend on a cold, winter weekday evening. At the time, we were looking for a new place to live, as I wanted somewhere bigger than my one-bedroom flat in north London. And, realising that I was not a squillionaire (or anywhere near close to it), we were looking south of the river for our next home – and so Balham it became.

Now residents of Balham for almost two years, we decided to pay Tagine another visit on Saturday evening, and it was certainly a lot livelier than our last visit – despite it also being a cold winter evening. The restaurant was packed, with no noticeable impact on the service which was friendly and attentive but not intrusive. I was glad we’d booked. 

Before our food arrived, Mrs BYO had a Berber cooler cocktail. You might think it’s strange for a BYO restaurant to serve cocktails (well, I thought so, anyway) and, indeed, to have a section on its website entitled “cocktails bar” – but they’re all non-alcoholic. The Berber cooler is a long raspberry drink made with apple and orange juice and zero booze.

To start, we shared houmous with pitta and kefta meshwiya, consisting of five meatballs sat on a smidgen of vegetable sauce. All good so far.

For our mains, we both had tagines. What else could we have in a restaurant with this name? I had the tagine makfoul, three large chunks of tender chicken on the bone cooked with Moroccan spices and with a tomato sauce on top, and Mrs BYO had mamounia tagine, lamb shank cooked with chickpeas and aubergine. 

We had a couple of sides to share: saffa coucous (saffron-flavoured couscous with sultanas), the flavour of which was too delicate for me – I couldn’t taste the saffron; and merguez batata harra, potatoes diced in the same way as you’d find patatas bravas in a tapas restaurant, but with chunks of spicy sausage on top, rather than a sauce. Very good indeed.

Neither of us could manage a dessert, but Mrs BYO finished with a Moroccan coffee, served in a small glass, with a normal coffee texture (unlike a Turkish coffee)  but with a star anise floating in it.

The bill came to £63 exactly, which includes a non-alcoholic cocktail (£4.50) and 12.5% service charge. There was no corkage for our bottle of wine.

Your nearest shop is the huge Sainsbury’s just around the corner; and there’s also an Oddbins near the Tube, a Waitrose on Balham Hill and We Brought Beer, the specialist beer shop on Hildreth Street.

We won’t leave it so long before our next visit.

Adiva

Address: 43A Commercial Street, London E1 6BD
Website: http://www.adivarestaurant.com/
Nearest tube stations: Aldgate East or Liverpool Street

It's mid-January and we're fast approaching the end of the now traditional month of Dryathlon, when those with more willpower than me abstain from alcohol for a month for the excellent cause of Cancer Research UK. There are lots of benefits in taking part, or in just cutting down. And, most importantly (for us), it's a good excuse to go to a BYO restaurant without BYOing - there's no booze on the menu, so there's less temptation to have a drink or three.

So, on to the review. This month, we visited Adiva, a Lebanese and Turkish fusion restaurant (their description, not mine).

For starters, we shared a mezze platter, a smorgasbord of treats (as neither the Turkish nor the Lebanese say) including pitta bread, three dips - hummus, a very good baba ganoush, and cacik (a yogurt based dip) - tabouleh, pastry parcels filled with minced lamb or feta and spinach, and a selection of meats, including slices of nicely-spiced sausage and skewers of lamb and chicken.

For my main, I had an iskender kebab. This is one of my favourite dishes, which I’ve most recently eaten in Kilikya’s, a fairly expensive Turkish restaurant in St Katharine’s Dock (main courses are around £18 to £20). The dish is a mix of chicken and lamb – some sliced and some kofta (made from mince) on a bed of bread, covered in tomato sauce and with a dollop of yogurt on top. Adiva’s iskender was very tasty, the meat well cooked but, for me, the bread was toasted too much and so didn’t soak up the sauce as much as I would have liked.

Mrs BYO had a chicken shawarma, chicken marinated in shawarma spice and onions, served with a side of rice with vermicelli and salad. She didn’t talk to me much while she was wolfing it down, so I took that to mean that she was enjoying it (as opposed to the alternative – I was in the doghouse for something or other).

No desserts for us this time, but Mrs BYO finished with a medium (strength, not size – they’re all mini) Turkish coffee, which she describes as a mix between a hot chocolate, coffee and mud. In a good way.

The bill came to £53.89 - or £41.92 without our soft drinks (two virgin Mojitos, which were surprisingly good even without the rum, and a Lebanese lemonade, a lemonade to which cardamom and orange blossom had been added). No tip was automatically added.

If you're a Dryathlete, you can skip over the next paragraph.

And if you’re not, you might be interested to know that corkage is £1.50 for wine and 50p per beer. You can pick up your booze from the Tesco Express at the bottom of Commercial Street, just round the corner from Aldgate East tube, or from the big Tesco on Bishopsgate, directly opposite Liverpool Street station.

PS why not donate the money you would have spent on booze to Cancer Research UK here, and remember to Gift Aid the donation if you're a UK taxpayer?

PPS if you like good Lebanese food and you’re in south-west London, we’d recommend trying Meza (no website; bookings on 07771 333157) on Mitcham Road in Tooting, which is not BYO but is so cheap and so good that you won’t mind having to pick your drink from the menu.