Choose your fighter when it comes to Caribbean food in London — tender jerk pork, luscious mango chow, Trini doubles good enough to make grown men weep — and there’s every chance the best place to find it will be far away from a traditional restaurant environment. Patty shops tout flaking, five-bite miracles for £2 a throw; smouldering jerk pans send out sensory lassos from backyards and street corners. Anyone who has popped into Maureen’s Kitchen for a takeaway order of what might genuinely be the city’s best fried chicken will know that it is in the literal kitchen of a Brixton three-bed. As recently asserted by Carnival, island gastronomy tends to be portable, lavishly cling-filmed and not necessarily about lingering in a meticulously moodboarded dining room.
At Mauby in Brockley, however, they are charting a different course. Founded by married couple Daniel and Heleena Maynard, this newish spot occupies the sort of beguiling, design-forward space that isn’t typically associated with Caribbean-inspired cuisine. Warm, cayenne pepper tones and gauzy café curtains frame its mostly glazed frontage. Jungly houseplants loiter on raised counters. The lighting, aided by guttering candles and dipped bulbs, is the soft, flattering glow of a perpetual Bajan sunset. Mauby (named for the herbal, Caribbean tree bark drink) is not perfect. But it is unique, charming and, in its own minor key way, quietly game-changing.
It is also, hot on the scuffed Salomons of Tollington’s, the latest retooling of a former chippy. Having previously run the Deptford hit Jerk Off BBQ (not a name to Google image search on a public computer), the Maynards crowdfunded an overhaul of a fallen local takeaway called Fishy Business. The deep fat fryers are gone, a yard once used for chopping potatoes is now a pretty little garden leading to the loos and a former storage room has been knocked through to create a main dining room fringed in burlap-strewn DIY benches, which channel both chic functionality and the sense memory of a recently completed sack race.
Smoked sausage made for a jolting curtain-raiser: a plump, balloon-knotted pork number, like an Eric Carle drawing made flesh, with the tensile snap of a good saveloy, bonfire-wafted spicing, and an enlivening yellow blot of homemade Bajan pepper sauce. Stewed kidney beans were simple but moreishly deep-flavoured and feijoada coded. Bajan cucumber salad danced a knife-edge of hot, zinging freshness.
Have you noticed that I’ve been referencing Barbadian culture with the wild abandon of a Rihanna biographer? Daniel Maynard’s family originally hail from both Barbados and Jamaica, and part of his mission here is to nudge mainstream knowledge of Caribbean dining from the latter to the former. This emphasis shift is especially evident on a tight but eclectic drinks menu rigged with quenching mauby, sorrel and sherbety “limon” soda cocktails that are available with or without booze. So there is irony to the fact that one of Mauby’s most lucid dishes is still its jerk chicken: two succulent, darkly charred pieces of bird, ringing with clove scent and simmering heat, and anointed by a sweet ladleful of spiced gravy.
Mauby seems like it is after slow, steady growth and permanence, rather than any frantic, short-lived harnessing of hype
There were some gently perplexing moments. A vast plate of dressed heritage tomato salad and sardines, trailed by the dry, store-bought water crackers that are a particular Proustian trigger for Jamaicans, struck me as oddly generic and a little awkward to eat. Pleasant, garlic mayo-dolloped fried new potatoes seemed to have wandered in from a different restaurant. And, though we were probably the only people in there to order practically the entire short menu, the cohesion of the meal would be helped by dishes being paced out rather than arriving in one overwhelming glut.
It is early days, though. Jerk Off BBQ’s roster of dishes and specials suggests the likes of jerked halloumi and pecan pie pudding could well be added to the mix soon. Moreover, Mauby seems like it is after slow, steady growth and permanence, rather than any frantic, short-lived harnessing of hype.
Notting Hill’s protective hoardings have been taken down and the chicken bones and gnawed corn cobs have been swept away for another year; the tonic wine hangovers have probably just about dissipated. Following that moveable feast, I really hope that this immensely likeable slice of British-Caribbean cool is here for the long haul.
