Review at a glance: ★★★★★
Not, as I initially thought, a form of guerrilla marketing for a banking app — that’s Monzo, it turns out — Cafe Mondo might be named for Mondo Cane, a piece of Sixties Italian filmmaking so madcap (sharks killed with sea urchins; snakes butchered for supper; an excess of breasts) that “mondo” became pseudo-Italian American slang, with a meaning that lands somewhere between extremely and huge, very and big. As in: that’s a mondo crap Monzo gag, but all things considered, hardly a mondo problem.
Or, as in mondo sandos, the creations that made the co-founders here, Jack Macrae and Viggo Blegvad, cultishly famous in south London. These sandos are about the size of arms crossed in worry, and not the kind cut into priggish cubes but submarine rolls gaping and stuffed with, say, chicken tikka masala or fish fingers and peas. Sandwiches good enough to draw crowds down to the Grove House Tavern in Camberwell, as well as the White Horse in Peckham, and good enough that 400 diners pledged almost £35,000 to help them open here, on Camberwell’s Peckham Road (where else?).
They have left the pub part behind. It is a café that looks like a chippie, a red-topped counter down one side and tiny yellow tables along the other, leading to a blue wall at the back. Primary colours; a strength. Art includes a poster of Bibendum, the Michelin man, which is the sort of thing cooks usually do in hopes of flattering the inspectors into giving them the nod. It’s a leg-pull. To my knowledge, no Michelin appraiser has ever made it to Peckham, at least not willingly.
In the daytime, the menu is all sandwiches and subs (egg salad, confit pork, green turkey, ecetera), with other bits and pieces on a strip of whiteboard hoisted behind the counter. Dinner guests get a menu proper — though not for drinks, which live on an insouciant blackboard which disdains detail: “we got wine” it says, refusing with a pouting lip to share any further. There’s “stout”, there’s “lager”. Brand fiends will be disappointed. But drinkers won’t: here the stout is Murphy’s, sweeter and smoother and altogether less money-hungry than Guinness.
And while you physically cannot spend more than £35 on wine — trust me, I tried — for that comes a very good bottle of Chardonnay. There are also cocktails, like the Spanish negroni — the same as the usual, only you have a nap two thirds of the way through — and the “teeny weeny msg martini” which offers proof that MSG is wonderful stuff and should be added to absolutely everything.
Perhaps that’s what they do here, perhaps that’s the secret. We probably shouldn’t have ordered just about everything from the menu, but then you can’t choose your mistakes. Still, it makes it easier to be confident in asserting the complete and utter excellence of the place.
Chicken thighs lazed on a kind of salsa verde, skin as crisp as frost
On a plate sprinkled with diced chive (perhaps another Michelin quip), out came spirals of anchovy, spiked with a toothpick to onions simmered in beef fat to velvet ribbons, sat on squares of crostini. Finely sliced wheels of finocchiona, tangy with fennel, lay across each other and under an unsteady mound of giardiniera, the Italian blend of pickled veg. Plates and plates of this with glasses of good, light red wine would be perfect for a date. On the other hand, the patty melt, with its crisp bread and oozing cheese and beef swaddled in those onions again, is the sort of food every break-up deserves (with a bottle, f*** the glasses).
Refined is not the word, but later a couth touch showed its hand in chicken thigh lazing on a kind of salsa verde, its skin as crisp as frost but underneath the meat glorious and full of juices. This, next to a wedge of brittle latke with a homemade brown sauce heavy with tomato and molasses, was almost elegant. It was also astonishingly delicious.
When the weather is dark and sad, the size of the place — it seats just 30 inside — is liable to leave many disappointed. Or queuing. A garden will open up as the weather does, and there are benches out the front too. It is charming small, but so good, so incandescently brilliant, that it deserves to be big. Very big. Sorry — I mean, mondo mondo.
Meal for two, about £70; @cafe_mondo_se5
