Telephone: 020 8766 6166
Address: 48 Westow Hill, London SE19
Dinner for two, including wine and service, £50
I am troubled by the Albert Camus conundrum. Trivia fetishists will know that, as well as being a key figure in the existentialist movement, the boy Camus was also goalie for the Algerian national football squad. Now here's the question: how did a man who believed that the inevitability of death made the rest of one's life a meaningless charade summon the will to stand in goal and stop a ball? 'Feh! It is only a ball. I make a save. I don't make a save. What difference does it make? Still I will die.' Etc.
My thoughts turned to the Camus question due to my experience at Numidie in Crystal Palace, south London. You might, quite reasonably, think that a restaurant which moves one to dwell on the finer points of nihilism is not really the best place for a fun evening out. However, the association is altogether more encouraging than it might at first seem. The restaurant is named after the ancient nation of Numidie, which more or less equates to the present-day Algeria. Hence the mosaic of ageing newspaper cuttings on the wall of the narrow, pleasantly shabby dining room. At its centre are pinned a number of large pieces about Zinedine Zidane, the French-Algerian football star. Seated here with a glass of something chilled in his hand, I think even a miserable git like Camus might have been moved to reassess his take on the whole meaningless existence thing.
I am not claiming that eating at Numidie is a life-changing experience, but it is the kind of place that so many of us crave: a good neighbourhood restaurant, with an acute understanding of why it's there; a place at ease with itself, serving up mostly good, satisfying food at reasonable prices.
The menu is, for the most part, drawn from north Africa, but with distinct nods towards France's blood-stained colonial misadventures there. So there are on the menu both merguez sausages and bouillabaisse. The merguez, served in a pungent tomato sauce, were solid and thick of girth, unlike the twigs of sausage we are used to. The bouillabaisse, here served more as soup than stew, was particularly good: rich, dense and with an uncompromisingly fishy edge. At £4.95 for a huge bowlful, it was also very good value. Of the other two starters chosen by my party of four, a salad of roast Mediterranean vegetables was good and solid if unsurprising. The only down note was crisp, nutty falafel which had a vicious chilli kick.
Main courses were equally as trustworthy. The most expensive dish, grilled sea bass for £12.50, brought the whole fish, stuffed with a mulch of sweet aromatic herbs.
A rack of lamb in a rosemary sauce was pink and meaty. Of the more obviously Algerian dishes, one of us chose the lamb couscous and the other the lamb tagine. These are, essentially, the same dish realised in different ways. In the tagine, the tender, fibrous hunks of lamb come in a ripe tomato sauce with a bowl of herbed couscous on the side. In the other dish, as its name suggests, the lamb lies on a bed of couscous and it is a bowl of the sauce and chickpeas which comes on the side. Both versions are equally as assured.
We shared just the one pudding, a poached pear in a red wine sauce, stuffed with almond paste. It split the party. A couple of people thought it the devil's work, but I rather liked the mix of textures and the differing levels of sweetness. There's a very short wine list, with nothing beyond £20, from which we chose a Rioja. There is also a tiny basement bar at Numidie. That night it was heaving with people, all of whom looked like they were determined to be nursing hangovers the next day. It is the kind of place I would have gone to as an intense late adolescent, to get drunk, smoke too much and argue about the meaning of life, without realising I had already found it.
