Book review: Café Cecilia

“When I look back on how I got into cooking professionally, it was mainly an attempt to escape depression, but the journey has led to a place of real happiness and fulfilment.” So starts Max Rocha’s cookbook Café Cecila​, describing a path into professional kitchens with which many chefs will no doubt identify. In Rocha’s case he was escaping the music management industry, ultimately finding solace in making a loaf of Guinness bread. ‘Bread saved my life’ is a chapter subheading in the book’s introduction, for Rocha this does not seem to be overstating things.

With such an engaging start it would follow that Rocha’s debut cookbook would take a deep dive into the mind of the chef, but the book is closely representative of Café Cecilia itself, Rocha’s pared back, unassuming Dalston restaurant. Instead, he takes up just four pages, charting his journey from Ballymaloe Cookery School and time spent in the kitchens of Skye Gyngell and St John Bread and Wine’s Farokh Talati to opening his own place (the pandemic and furlough occupy just a few hundred words) before the business end of the cookbook begins in earnest. Like the majority of the recipes, there is a refreshing brevity to Rocha’s work – this is very much a cookbook and not a life story or a work of philosophy.

So, what of the 100 or so recipes themselves? Café Cecilia​ is divided into 13 chapters, one entirely devoted to the aforementioned Guinness bread without which there would be no restaurant, and others dedicated to breakfast, snacks, salads and soups, pasta, meat and fish starters, fish, meat, desserts, and essentials. Each chapter is accompanied by a short introduction, gently outlining the approach of the restaurant and offering snippets of facts such as the most popular dishes on the menu, his favourite prep job (making pasta) but it’s not long before you’re back among the dishes.

If all this sounds simplistic then that’s the point. Rocha’s cooking is all about celebrating his Irish upbringing and finding simplicity and beauty in fresh, seasonal, unfussy and incredibly pleasing food – whether this be boiled eggs on toast with coolea; a pork pasta that comprises way fewer ingredients than you might give it credit, and a deep-fried bread and butter pudding with cold custard that is likely to rise to the top of anyone’s favourite dessert list.

Some chef’s cookbooks are an extension of their restaurants, others serve to give voice to feelings and opinions that food alone cannot convey, while others celebrate the minutiae of running an establishment and the suppliers behind it – and all have their place. Café Cecilia is none of these but rather an embodiment of Rocha’s cooking and his restaurant. If you know the restaurant it will sing to you, if you don’t, you’ll want to remedy that in due course.

Café Cecilia Cook Book​
Max Rocha​
Number of pages: 255​
Standout dish: Guinness treacle tart, or Guinness bread ice cream​
Publisher and price: Phaidon, £34.95​