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.