Meat and fish are grilled in a special coal oven at this new restaurant occupying the beautifully restored former Grade II listed ticket office, originally part of Peckham Rye’s train station in the 1930s. Coal Rooms from the entrepreneurs behind the Old Spike Roastery, Camberwell’s Spike + Earl, Peckham restaurant Aside and coffee-based charity Change Please, will open mid-August, official date still TBA.
The site will feature a 24-seater café which transforms into a bar in the evenings; 13 counter seats around a large, sunken, open-plan kitchen; a main restaurant space for 30 covers and a private dining room for up to 14 guests.
The menu makes use of the restaurant’s on-site butchery, focusing on a variety of meats and unusual cuts, cooked on the robata grill and coal oven. Head chef Sam Bryant has worked in the kitchens of Smokehouse, Princess of Shoreditch and Norfolk’s Dabbling Duck. There’s a real focus on working creatively to reduce waste in the kitchen. For example, the restaurant’s tiramisu will be made using excess milk from the on-site café.
Mornings at Coal Rooms will start with dishes such: Coffee-cured bacon sandwich with a choice of three cuts of bacon (cured on site) and scrambled eggs with sriracha mayonnaise, cheese, chives and hot dog onions.
On the lunch menu: Flatbreads from the coal oven with internationally inspired toppings such as pig’s cheek, xo sauce and crackling and crab rarebit, egg yolk and samphire.
By night there’s a robust menu of meats and fish: Dry-aged duck breasts, Mangalitsa cowboy steaks, roasted cod heads, and 40 day-aged Dexter sirloin and rib. House sauces include: Red eye gravy (using coffee to deglaze the pan), crab apple jelly, jerk caramel, and greengage and mead ketchup. There’s also an intriguing list of sides and small plates: Smoked eel and pig’s head sausage with gooseberry sauce; creamed and burned corn, roasted bone marrow curry; and broad bean ragout, green olive, feta and preserved lemons.
Beef and pork comes from Charles Ashbridge in Yorkshire, Goat from Cabrito and Welsh lamb from Daphne’s and are all prepared in the on-site butchery and priced per 100g or served to share.
Watch this space for soft launch details…
