Mauby, London: ‘Exactly the vibe you want’ – restaurant review

Mauby, 1 Harefield Road, London SE4 1LW (maubybrockley.com). All dishes £4-£10, wines from £18, all cocktails £10

A few weeks ago, I wrote one long, wretched primal scream about the terrible insult to the words “hot dog” that I had to eat at Harrods in your service. If you were worried about me after that, and I understand you might have been, you can now relax. For here I am at Mauby, a new Caribbean restaurant in Brockley, southeast London, and the first plate before us is a single, fat smoked sausage with exactly the right crisp-skinned snap and the correct smooth, juicy interior that I had hoped for. With it are pickles and a yellow Bajan pepper sauce full of heat and vinegar and vigour. It was everything I hoped it would be. This one dish sent all the bad memories packing.

There are many ways to get to Mauby, not least by foot if you are lucky enough to live within a smoke and allspice-sniff of the place. I took the overground from Highbury & Islington, a train route which in February was renamed the Windrush Line by Transport for London. The new title has not been entirely without controversy. Some saw it as a mere gesture. There are, they say, still too many people who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean from the 40s onwards, who suffered as part of the Windrush scandal for which Theresa May apologised, and who are still awaiting justice, be it for wrongful imprisonment, deportation or infringement of legal rights.

It’s a fair point. But the renaming has also been taken by many as a tribute to the contribution made by people from the islands to the capital, as it trundles through Afro-Caribbean communities from Dalston in the north of London to Peckham in the southeast. It makes it an appropriate way to arrive at this wine bar and bistro celebrating the food of Jamaica and Barbados. Given the power of cocktails often made with an awful lot of rum, it helps that it’s merely a three-minute stagger from restaurant door to platform. My first drink is a cocktail made with the sweet sharpness of sorrel and lime, lending a briskness to a good measure of that Jamaican Wray & Nephew rum. The evening has begun.

Mauby, which is the name of a Caribbean drink made from tree bark, belongs to Daniel Maynard, who has both Barbadian and Jamaican heritage, and his partner Heleena. It began life as a mildly restless project called Jerk Off BBQ. It is tempting to suggest with a knowing wink, that you should be careful before looking that up online, but I got to the 15th page of a Google search without finding anything not related to smoke, sauce or dry rubs of an entirely innocent kind. For a few years they worked out of a unit in Deptford and ran a street-food operation, building a fanbase, before crowdfunding to convert this old chippy. You can see where the money hasn’t gone. It is a simple, warm, bare-bones space. There’s a paprika-coloured frontage framing half net-curtained windows. There’s a nailed-together wooden bar upon which sits a bowl heaped with oranges. There are rough-textured walls, wooden tables and, as evening falls, the gutter of a few candles.

It is a conscious reframing of the food of the islands. I live in Brixton and have long been a fan of the neighbourhood’s takeaways: simple places like Brompton Jerk Kitchen which operates most Saturdays in the alley out the back of a café opposite Brockwell Park, serving crusty slabs of crackled jerk pork fresh off the drum BBQ, or the cult Maureen’s Kitchen round the corner from me on Railton Road, who literally cooks in her domestic kitchen, and delivers her food in boxes of pure cardboard.

Through familiarity and repetition, we assume that’s how it must always be with this food, but the Maynards are rightly determined to show there are other ways; that it cannot and should not be overlooked. Mauby offers a short, impressively cheap menu of small plates, plus a few well-chosen wines and cocktails. Alongside the £8 sausage of my dreams, there’s a £6 bowl of their beans stewed “homestyle” in a thumping gravy. If that’s the style of their home, I want to move in. It’s the sort of comfort food that would make any bad day better. From the lighter and brighter side of the ledger there is a Bajan cucumber salad, sparky with Scotch bonnet, fragrant with chopped green herbs, sprightly with vinegar. Or have the heritage tomato salad, a platter of well-dressed discs in yellow, red and purple, topped with a couple of fat, meaty sardines, silver-skinned, brown-fleshed and deeply flavoured. A bowl of crispy new potatoes with garlic mayo is a cheery accompaniment, although it feels like an interloper from a different small plates restaurant.

The most expensive dish tonight costs a mighty £10. It is a heavily sauced jerk chicken thigh and drumstick, with a properly crunchy blackened skin, and a big old hit of pimento and mace. It’s easy to assume this would always be part of the repertoire. Not so. A new menu was introduced just a week or so after I ate there, and jerk chicken isn’t on it. That new menu includes charred pumpkin with Bajan tamarind sauce, crispy okra with pepper mayo, home-style stewed pork – that home really is sounding inviting – fried sprats with lemon and braised butter beans. The message is this: you should park your assumptions about what must be available at such a place. Having given one list of dishes a complete shake down, I’d happily do the same with the other. The only constant amid the savouries is the carbohydrate ballast of plantain, served in a bronzed, fried heap. I confess plantain has never done it for me. It’s an acquired taste that I have never quite acquired. I accept that I may be the one missing out here.

Dessert is handled by a plate of rum-sodden chocolate truffles, which are so soft they’re almost a dark ganache being held together only by a thick cocoa dusting and politeness. This is not a complaint. On an early Friday evening, Mauby has exactly the vibe you want of it: relaxed, mellow and bubbling with end-of-week chatter. It feels like a new business that has worked out what it needs to be from the very start. On the short walk back to the station I come across a chap tending to a smoky barbecue beneath a street corner tree. He’s offering more jerk chicken to the Friday night crowd. I conclude I rather like Brockley.

News bites

After 14 years, James Robb and Alan Kilpatrick, the impeccably tasteful duo behind the East Pier Smokehouse in St Monan’s, Fife, are calling it a day. But they are determined that the much-loved seasonal restaurant, famed for serving lobster and chips and seafood curries in cardboard containers, should not just become another fish and chip shop. In short, they are looking for successors. As Robb says, ‘A busy restaurant needs fit, young creative people with a passion for food and hard work. We have plenty of passion, but youth and fitness are slipping away. It’s torch passing time.’ If running a bare-bones seafood restaurant on the Scottish east coast is calling to you, you’re invited to email them for more information (info@eastpier.co.uk).

The staff of Gloria Trattoria, part of the Big Mamma Group, are staging a dinner to raise funds to help save Casa Italiana, the social club which has served London’s Italian community in Clerkenwell since 1960 and which is now under threat from rising costs and falling membership. Tickets for the four-course dinner, which is taking place at the club on 14 November, cost £60. Find details of the menu and buy tickets here.

Recently, I announced the closure of Café Kitty at the Underbelly Boulevard Theatre in Soho. Now comes news of its replacement. Peckham stalwarts Artusi have just opened Artusi Soho there, serving seasonal Italian dishes, including a pre-theatre menu of two courses for £25 and three for £30. Read more about the restaurant here.

Join Jay Rayner and Grace Dent on Monday 16 December as they discuss his new cookbook Nights Out At Home, live at Kings Place and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1