Weekends are the days that I don’t only look forward to in the sense of free time and copious amounts of sleep, but another big reason I look forward to the weekend is food. During the week, besides going to the gym when I can, I pretty much sit on my butt all day so try and eat as well as possible. This means I take it upon myself to eat ANYTHING I like come Saturday. As I mentioned in a previous post, I like to try a different restaurant each weekend if I can – last weekend was Brasserie Zedel and this weekend I stayed local and went to The Begging Bowl in Peckham.

When you think about Peckham these days, you mostly think about what’s on offer towards the Rye Lane side of the area. The Bussey Building, Frank’s Rooftop Bar in the summer, the Peckhamplex and the huge choice of bars on offer. But exit Peckham Rye station and turn right and right again, you’ll walk down Blenheim Grove and out onto Bellenden Road, which has its own stretch of lovely pubs and restaurants.

I’d heard good things about The Begging Bowl for a while and wanted to try it for myself. What particularly interested me was that it was Thai food made for sharing so it means you can try lots of different dishes which I love to do! Tapas is one of my favourite dishes and this sounded like a similar way of eating. The restaurant doesn’t take bookings unless you are a party of 8 or more, so when we turned up there was an hour wait (which was to be expected) so we popped across the road for a drink in the Victoria pub before we got a call to say our table was ready.

When you sit down its recommended to you to choose 4 or 5 dishes to share and that the food is cooked fresh so will arrive at different times. After studying the menu for a while to make sure we’d picked the best options – nothing worse than seeing a plate of food brought past and wishing you’d chosen that instead – we certainly had no regrets about our picks because the food was amazing.

We chose crispy pork skin with green chilli relish, steamed greens, relish of dorset crab & salted duck egg, pork shoulder and sticky rice. The pork shoulder came out first, and at first I thought we should wait for some more of the food to arrive, but we couldn’t wait and started straight away which turned out to be a good idea. It meant the evening was nicely paced and just as we finished one dish, a new amazing looking dish arrived – it was like eating non-stop! You can tell how much I liked it from the fact I have no photos to show for it, I just got stuck in straight away as it looked too good to wait even for a photo opp.

The main advantage of the food coming as and when its cooked meant it was super fresh and you could tell as it came out of the kitchen piping hot. Pretty much everything I ate was new to me; it was either a new type of food or a new way of cooking it, which was fun to try.

I’d definitely eat there again and try some even more adventurous options on the menu next time, but I could definitely eat the crispy pork skin over and over and over. I probably shouldn’t though – definitely the unhealthiest thing on the menu, but absolutely the tastiest.