Poulet Rouge is a simple but enjoyable restaurant in Balham serving – you guessed it – chicken which we visited recently for a post-New Year lunch.
The menu is unfussy, pretty much just offering different fractions of chicken (quarter, half or whole) with sides, chips and sauces to go alongside it. All the side dishes are unpretentious but tasty and largely traditional French recipes. We joked that this is a kind of upmarket Nandos, but to actually describe it as such would do the place a disservice as the food was much better than that and there was excellent table service in the form of a charming Dan Stevens lookalike (yes, he had been told before that he looks like Matthew from Downton, but he didn’t seem to mind being told again).
Poulet Rouge is very reasonably priced for a meal out (they also do takeaway), particularly if you go for lunch, as we did, when they offer deals on a quarter of a chicken and one or two side dishes. We weren’t sure if a quarter of chicken and two sides would be enough, but we really needn’t have worried – a quarter seemed about twice as big as it does at Nandos. We didn’t feel like dessert but we’ve been told that their crepes (both sweet and savoury) are worth trying too.
The restaurant is light and the decorative tiled floor is easy for wheelchair and stick users. The entrance is step free, although there is a slight lip to it which we only noticed on the way out. The big problem is with the toilet which is, as we explained to the waiter, a Quasi Khazi – there’s plenty of space for a wheelchair inside but no grab rails (there may also be a need to move a table out of the way of the door for wheelchairs to fit through). We hope that the message reaches the owners and they invest in a couple of grab rails as it’s so simple to make the Poulet Rouge facilities more accessible.
We enjoyed our meal at Poulet Rouge – it’s not exactly fine dining but it’s also much more than a fast food chicken shop – and give reasonable marks for style. The access in the main is also good but we were disappointed by ‘the facilities’.
Sorry Dan, but we can only give Poulet Rouge 1.5 out of 3 BBS Ticks.
