Grace and Flavour: The Begging Bowl

So, off I trotted to Peckham on the off chance of dinner. I hadn’t been for a few years, since a friend used to live there. My abiding memory is plentiful minimarts, bad transport links and the injured and dying crashing against my friend’s bay window gasping, ‘Heeeeeellllp meeee!’ and leaving unsightly blood smears that no organic Windolene pastiche could remove. Meanwhile, I bought a place in East London in an equally stabby environment — but to its credit, every now and then the You Me Bum Bum Train collective does an immersive art experience and then another no-reservation street food gazebo appears to feed the eager punters, which, believe me, is true spiritual balm.

Peckham these days is up-and-coming, so everyone says. People keep telling me this. And I found a lot of the Peckhamites who have upped and come sitting in The Begging Bowl, a pretty, inviting, brightly lit room in a smart terrace of shops about 20 minutes walk from the Overground. The menu is a single sheet of 14 Thai dishes, all served with rice. The font colour of the dish (pink, orange, green) denotes the price and all dishes are sharing plates and appear as they’re ready, in no particular order — although some are certainly starters. Yes, all this makes my head hurt, too, but I love that restaurants nowadays like to make ordering like a round in The Crystal Maze called ‘The Hungry Room’ where we contestants attempt to solve the puzzle.

I ordered five dishes: fish cakes with a sweet chilli sauce, large and spongey and not particularly moreish; crispy rice with chicken, pork and peanut dip — a rich, lukewarm, very addictive satay sauce and what felt like M&S speciality crisps to dip into it; charcoal-grilled sirloin of beef, which tasted delightfully rare but had no suggestion of being chargrilled and was wholly unseasoned; a salad of deep-fried salmon with sour fruits and red chilli dressing, which was a cacophony of bold ideas in one small dish that knocked me into next Tuesday; and aromatic duck curry with cucumber relish, a rich bowl of meat on the bone in a pool of wickedly unmistakable ‘Northern-chipshop-style’ curry sauce, which was utterly perfect. The rice kept arriving. Rice: fragrant and sticky and crispy. I think I was subconsciously carb-loading for a marathon I haven’t even filled out the paperwork for. If my dinner had been just a starter at the beginning that had been officially ‘a starter’, followed by the duck with some rice, I’d have been quite jocund.

I ate too much rice too quickly. It was a necessary tactical manoeuvre to clear space, as the table for two was as small as a child’s school desk. ‘Will you be wanting a dessert?’ asked the cheery waitress. ‘Yes, we’ll see the menu,’ I said, falling on my sword in the name of ‘professionalism’. ‘Oh, we only have one dessert: mango and sticky rice.’ ‘Bring it to me,’ I said, ‘although my knickers are already so tight I may need to slip them off under the table.’ They brought me the bill quite promptly after that. I walked back down Peckham High Street kicking my feet through rotten cabbages. It was not a vintage evening.