South Wimbledon

Saturday is shop day.  I wonder how many times since I started writing during the pandemic I have made reference to my weekly shop.  Even two years later it still feels unusual to plan meals for the week and buy all the ingredients on a single trip to a supermarket.  Such were the habits of my life pre-COVID that this still feels like a strange thing to do. Of course I quite enjoy it.

This evening we left home about 6:30pm and walked to South Wimbledon to hop on the Underground to Tooting Bec where we met Mark and Rob in the Wheatsheaf pub. I was surprised that we did not see a few more St George’s Day flags on the way. We had a couple of beers before heading back towards Tooting Broadway where we were going to a French restaurant called Bordelaise in Tooting Broadway market. It was further down the road than we imagined and Mark was forced to call the restaurant to tell them we were still coming.  It seems on a Saturday night they could easily have given our table a way a couple of times over so it was a relief to see it waiting for us.

The most surprising element of the evening was how Tooting Broadway Market, which I remember from when I used to pick up fruit and veg there when we first moved to Earlsfield, has transformed itself into a vibrant evening market full of restaurants and music. I guess some might even use the label Street Food. The restaurant’s have a mix of inside seating and/or seats in in the market itself.  Ours had a mixture but we sat on the outside bit which was all the better to hear all the music (somewhere there was a DJ) and spend time people watching.  The atmosphere - and the snails that we had for starters - were excellent.  In the end £85 for 2 was pricey but not extreme.

Afterwards we darted across the road to The Castle for a bootle of wine to end the evening. It was nice they they didn’t close until midnight by which time it was even nicer that the bus home departed from just across the junction at Tooting Broadway station.