Coal Rooms will occupy the office that was originally part of Peckham Rye’s train station in the 1930s and will be a 24-seater café by day and a bar by night. In the evenings, the space will transform to feature 13 counter seats around a sunken, open-plan kitchen as well as a main restaurant for 30 covers and a private dining room for up to 14 guests.
The new venture is from the Peckham-based team behind the cafe Old Spike Roastery and restaurant Aside, both in Peckham, and all-day cafe, bar and restaurant Spike + Earl in Camberwell. It is due to open on 12 August.
The kitchen will be headed by chef Sam Bryant, previously of Smokehouse in Islington, Princess of Shoreditch and Norfolk’s Dabbling Duck. Bryant’s menu will make extensive use of a robata grill and coal ovens as well as the restaurant’s on-site butchery, which will focus on a variety of meats and unusual cuts.
The all-day operation will serve breakfast items such as a 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. Lunch options will focus on flatbreads from the coal oven with toppings such as pig’s cheek, xo sauce and crackling and crab rarebit, egg yolk and samphire.
In the evening the menu will take a more meat-based approach with dry-aged duck breasts, Mangalitsa cowboy steaks, roasted cod heads, and 40 day-aged Dexter sirloin and rib making an appearance, accompanied by sauces such as red eye gravy that uses coffee to deglaze the pan, crab apple jelly, and greengage and mead ketchup.
James Galton, also from Smokehouse and most recently the Chicken of the Woods supper club in Hornsey Town Hall, will be Coal Rooms’ general manager.
“As locals to the area, both as existing business owners and residents, we wanted to create a space that respected the heritage of the landmark site while providing a new drinking and dining experience for the people of Peckham,” says Coal Rooms’ co-owner Richard Robinson.
“We felt it important that a local group who knew and understood the uniqueness of Peckham took it on and delivered something that worked for the area.”