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.