Avalon in Clapham South

The Avalon is exactly what Clapham South has been waiting for: a huge, sprawling gastropub with unabashedly bourgeois intentions. A place where afternoon and evening drinking in the pub’s sizeable, Victorian-styled bar will undoubtedly spill over into the Bibendum-esque dining room for food. Step inside the new venture from Renaissance pubs, and you enter a completely different world to that inhabited by its predecessor The George.

Gone are the sport-emblazoned plasma screens. The fruit machines that once stood dormant are no more and I suspect you’re more likely to find a pearl in one of your fresh fine de Claire oysters (£9 for half a dozen) than you are to find a sachet of ketchup (or any other irksomely packaged condiment) at the Avalon.

With its huge, grandiose, chain-link chandeliers and gleaming white tiling in the back dining room, you’d be forgiven for imagining that the pub-cum-restaurant has been this way for some time. Not so – the whole transformation has been turned around in a matter of weeks.

On the night we visit, the place is absolutely buzzing with Clapham-ites young and old, checking out the new place in town. We head straight for our table with rumbling stomachs and get stuck into two glasses of Proseco (£4.95) which are soft and light as they should be. We get some olives to nibble on but they are a little bit stiff, not luscious and moist and coming away from their pips as I like them.

I start with a lobster Caesar salad (£8) which is excitingly decadent and full of big hunks of fresh, fleshy lobster. The dressing is rich, creamy and sour and the croutons hard, deep-fried and oily. My companion opts for a chorizo and goats cheese salad with raspberry vinaigrette which is also very nice, the chorizo good and rich and the cheese outrageously unctuous.

It’s my main of Scottish fillet steak though, that steals the show – which is just as well at  £19. It’s 220g of extremely superior steak – meltingly tender, deep in flavour and bloody on my plate. My only grumble is that, though I ordered dauphinoise potatoes as a side (£3.50), the waiter neglects to tell me that it already comes with chips – so I had a double-carb whammy. My companion’s halibut steak (£16) with vine tomatoes is ‘very, very fresh’ and our pinot noir the perfect accompaniment.

We finish on a high with a zesty, creamy lemon meringue pie (£5.50), that the waitress enthusiastically ensures me is ‘made on the premises’ and a sticky toffee pudding (£5) which comes with an evil but divine butter toffee sauce.

It was all very nice, but our bill came to £90, which isn’t cheap for a gastropub. You can get a three course meal for £16 quid down the road at Brasserie James, but the Avalon is a good addition to the area, somewhere that you can kick back with a big group and relax with some above-average grub and a good wine list, so if you’re in the area, take a look.

Avalon
16 Balham Hill
Balham SW12 9EB

Tel: 020 8675 8613