While we were waiting for our wine I looked around. The place is huge and every effort has been put in to make it feel airy and spacious. Simple, uniformed tables and chairs are surrounded by vast bare brick walls, which might have been too sparce had it not been for how carefully considered the industrial lighting is, creating more intimate spaces and soft, bright focal points.
Beagle has a good looking menu, both in food description and the lovely stamped logo design, infact the whole place is easy on the eye. If restaurants were humans, Beagle would be 6' tall dark and handsome one!
What We Ordered:
Wood pigeon terrine
It looked great on the plate. Terrine isn't really my thing, especially a pigeon one but the bright purple cabbage next to the deep crimson meat made me tuck in.
Grilled asparagus, chive butter and bantam Egg
It's aparagus season, so I always make the most of those juicy stems. The chive butter was delicious, like a less rich hollandaise. A 'bantam' egg, it turns out after looking it up is just a slightly smaller chicken, from Asia but its still a bloody chicken just the egg is half the size. I really don't understand why restaurants feel the need to big up the egg.. 'a hen's egg' and now a 'bantam egg'. What's wrong with a normal egg? Eggs are great as they are, they don't need a fancy introduction.
Octopus, tomatoes and coriander
Over to my friend's comments on this, not being a huge octopus fan, but they were the most interested in this out of everything. I can vouch the tomatoes were tasty as was the coriander salsa verde.
Chicken with alioli
This dish is lucky the chicken was so tender and tasty, some of the best I've had, especially with a dollop of the subtle smoked alioli* becuase the panzanella (olive, celery, tomoato and bread salad) was soggy and awful. Like the salad you haul along to a picnic, with good intention of being healthy then you decide you'd rather have a sausage and the salad gets forgotten and left out in the sun to warm up.
*Perhaps ask if they bought a new smoke machine becuase the waitress informed us their smoker had been nicked the night before, which is a disaster becuase that alioli really was good.
Almond and prune tart
Comforting, although slightly on the small side. Perhaps I'm being unfair as we were sharing between 3 but I'm sure the next table got a bigger one.
Cheese board
Really good. Perhaps the highlight, although they only had two options and they were miniscule slices. I can't remember what cheese we had but just look at the one on the right and drool.
I think the reason I am going on so much about the interior and design is because the food didn't wow me but I would definitely go back. Beagle is a great place to have a relaxed glass of very good value wine and some cheese, with friends. The staff are friendly and really know their stuff and it has a nice outside seating for when the rain stops.
No comments :
Post a Comment