Located within the Alexandra Trust Dining Rooms, the 130-cover venue will include a 70-cover dining room with a ceviche bar, Peruvian rotisserie and open grill, and a 60-cover bar area serving bar snacks, Pisco cocktails and British and Latin American craft beers. A takeaway menu and local delivery service will also be available.
Food menu
The menu will introduce new Peruvian flavours, techniques and cooking styles inspired by Morales’s travels to Peru. For example, the new restaurant will offer Chifa (Peruvian-Chinese) and Nikkei (Peruvian-Japanese) dishes, alongside Criollo and Afro-Peruvian BBQ plates and Amazonian and Andean superfoods.
At the ceviche bar, diners will be able to watch chefs preparing ceviches in front of them and customise their orders.
The open BBQ grill will serve anticucho skewers, and introduce ‘Pollo a la brasa’ – rotisserie chicken in Ceviche’s own-recipe marinade. The menu will be completed by salads and bar snacks featuring seasonal British vegetables and Peruvian foods such as maca, quinoa, amaranth and lucuma
The kitchen team is formed of of Peruvian-trained chefs with experience working at Amaz, Astrid & Gaston and Central in Lima, as well as London restaurants Ottolenghi and Barrafina.
Design and vision
Born of the collaboration between Morales and Fabled Studio, the design will focus on restoring the Alexandra Trust Dining Rooms’ original features and Victorian architecture, while adding hints of Peruvian aesthetics.
The building was erected in 1898 as a place for East London’s working class to eat and socialise, with up to 12,000 meals served daily, and Ceviche Old Street hopes to draw on that heritage by offering affordable sharing plates and a relaxed socialising space.
Dark redwood panelling will be used for the bar and counters, and original tiling and glazed brickwork will be visible throughout the restaurant.
This is Morales’s third Peruvian restaurant in London, after Ceviche Soho and Andina Shoreditch.“We are thrilled to be able to bring a dining legacy back to life with Ceviche Old St,” he said.
“When I first imagined opening my own Peruvian restaurant in London, I dreamt of seeing customers enjoy fresh ceviche prepared before their eyes, experiencing the heat and thrill of barbeque meats cooked anticucho-style on an open grill, all on one floor and under one roof.
“I imagined serving food rooted in Peruvian tradition yet made with a contemporary edge, drawing on the best of London’s creativity and ingredients. I am very proud of my team and what we have achieved at both Ceviche Soho and Andina in Shoreditch and hope locals and visitors to Old Street alike will embrace our partnering of British and Peruvian heritage and modernity at Ceviche Old St.”