Peckham Bazaar: Bringing the perfect Mediterranean holiday grilled meal to your doorstep

Albeit it might not be on your doorstep, but it’s certainly worth an hour’s train journey, or so, says Ed Cumming

The kitchen is not so much open, but part of the restaurant, so much so you half expect to be asked to turn over a skewer on the grill as you walk in (Photos Milos Radoicic)

Peckham Bazaar is a simple room on an unassuming residential corner, with plain chairs and tables and happy customers lit by candles. The kitchen is not so much open as actually inside the dining room, a thin grill space running along one inside wall.

One effect of this is that as you walk in, you half expect to be asked to grab some more charcoal or turn some skewers. Another is that the air is thick with food smoke.

The aroma of grilling meats and spices and simmering vegetables hits your nostrils as soon as you open the door.

It’s a bit like getting off the plane on holiday, and the effect is probably more wonderful in summer, with a breeze.

In January, it is a touch cloying and my contacts start to sting. I worry that the vegetarian friend I’ve brought will be literally cured as we eat.

“Is it always like this?” I ask our waiter. “Yes”, she says.

Anyway, it’s nothing a more powerful extractor couldn’t fix, and as soon as the food arrives I forget my whinging.

The menu, by the Albanian-born chef John Gionleka, is pan-Balkan, drawn “from the Dinaric Alps to the beaches of Anatolia”, with a shortish changing list of dishes, most of them involving the charcoal grill, roughly split between meat and fish and plants.

He and his business partner now have a sister restaurant, at the Dulwich Lyceum, but it seemed remiss not to try the original first. The dishes are presented in ascending price order.

Rabbit and apricot pastilla, caramelised celeriac puree, soft boiled quail egg (Milos Radoicic)

It’s a refreshing change from being given a list stratified into micro-snacks, and half-intros and semi-puddings.

The recommended dose is four between two, and while they are shareable it would also be easy to do a starter-main-pudding, for anyone craving a more Tory structure.

On another day I’ll come back for pork and veal keftedes, the octopus, a lamb and almond pastilla and a kebab of Scottish sirloin, but with the vegetarian, I follow her lead.

First, a generous board of bread, thick-dusted with za’atar. Then some courgette, feta and mint fritters.

So often these are soggy blobs, but here they are properly browned, with hot dark crunchy carapaces and meltingly soft interiors, served with a wedge of lemon and a tzatziki of cucumber, radish and kohlrabi.

Then some kourkourbines, a Greek dish of gnocchi-like semolina dough, served with cauliflower roasted dark and rich in the oven, topped with shavings of graviera.

After that, imam bayildi​, the Turkish classic of aubergine and pepper and pine nuts. By this point, I’m craving meat, just in time for soft, melting slow-braised lamb that seems to pull apart before the fork even touches it, on a bed of buttery beans and tomato, with dollops of ktipiti.

Grilled king tiger prawn, tomato, feta and ouzo saganaki (Milos Radoicic)

We have some baklava and some kind of chocolate thing, apparently excellent, but I manage not to take a photograph of them, so who knows?

Peckham Bazaar has been a quiet neighbourhood classic for a few years now, and entirely merits its reputation.

It’s the kind of place everyone wants around the corner, worth a trip if you are not lucky enough to live nearby.

Not on a plane, perhaps, but easily an hour on the train. It’s like every great restaurant you’ve been to on a Mediterranean holiday, refined and condensed into one warm, welcoming room, five minutes walk from Peckham Rye station.

Would I go again? Yes
Should you go? Yes
Can you take your parents? Yes

Peckham Bazaar, 119 Consort Rd, Peckham, London SE15 3RU; 020 7732 2525​; peckhambazaar.com; Tues-Sun