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.