Cuisine: Modern European
Cost:
Rating:
Where?: 16, Balham Hill, London. SW12 9EB
Closest station(s): Clapham South, Clapham Common, Clapham Junction, Balham.
Telephone: 0208 675 8613
Website: www.theavalonlondon.com
Being a delightful summer’s day and wanting to sit outside the Avalon seemed a good choice as somewhere to go for sustenance and a drop of wine. Falling into the category of gastropub the Avalon sits between Clapham South and Balham with a large terrace at the front and a huge garden at the back. Whilst the atmosphere is pleasant enough there is something a little flat about the whole place, the inside is forgettable and the outside rather like someone went on a shopping trip to a garden centre and bought all the chunky wooden furniture they could find without a thought as to how it would look when they got home.
I thoroughly enjoyed my starter of crab with wasabi aioli, cucumber and fried basil (£6.95)– not a complicated dish but one that was well suited to the good weather and packing sufficient flavour. It was therefore rather a shame that the mains were such a let-down. There was nothing specifically wrong with my dish of linguine with rock shrimps, garlic and lemon; apart from the lack any real flavour. Eating the dish was very much like eating a bowl of pasta that one might knock up at home in a couple of minutes with a dollop of jarred pesto smeared on top – on this occasion it simply had a scattering of prawns. My dining partner’s stuffed courgette with lentils and mozzarella was again uninspiring and bland (and a little too healthy for my tastes). I don’t believe that the ingredients necessarily lend themselves to great feats of flavour, however if the chef hadn’t thought of a way to give the dish some taste then it has to be questioned whether it should be on the menu. At £11 - £21 for mains, though not expensive, a lot more could have been expected.
At £14 the house wine was perfectly acceptable and the bloody Mary with which I started was also well made. The Avalon is not a bad pub, I would happily return to sit in at the front to have a cheapish bottle of wine in the sun and perhaps share a couple of the cheaper starters to fight off any pangs of hunger. I will not however be returning to for a meal, as with too many places it has attempted to jump on the gastropub band wagon without, to my mind, considering what it means or putting sufficient effort into the food.