Hausu, London: ‘The food is far better than this already fun concept needs’

The first time I visited Hausu, I vowed not to get too caught up in the food. I was with someone I vaguely wanted to impress, and so I resolved to lock in, professional curiosity aside. Blue eyes, 6ft 4in, the stuff of memes: I had this. I made it 10 or so minutes. Just enough time for a bouncy host to deposit us at stools beside the pass, plenty close enough for anyone food-motivated to accidentally neglect their dinner-mate in favour of gazing at plates of whole grilled trout, glistening with green chilli seaweed butter, as they whisked by.

Once I’d unwound from pass-rubbernecking long enough to order, two briny Gibsons and a ceramic cup of chicken broth arrived, laced with lemongrass and shrimp paste. The broth, a £4 afterthought order, proved a revelation. We followed short, hot mouthfuls with sips of sharp martini – the ideal chaser to the discs of schmaltz, rendered down and blended with coriander, that dotted the surface. Next came a grilled chicken thigh with crackling skin, served with a holy trinity of shiso leaf, lime wedge, pickled guindilla pepper. Then a slab of monkfish, dressed in crab bisque. By the time I was spooning up the last of it, I’d planned to return.

Hausu lives in an offshoot of Peckham Rye station. (If that sounds deeply unglamorous, don’t worry – only the capacious tiled bathrooms hint at a transport hub, and they do it charmingly.) The ground floor is split into three rooms. If you too are easily distracted, keep on walking to the rear one, which trades leather banquettes for bar stools and flatteringly soft lighting for views of an open kitchen. Upstairs, a cocktail bar uses gauzy curtains to carve nookish hideouts from a boxy floorplan.

The restaurant, which shares a name with a 1977 Japanese horror-comedy, resists pledging allegiance to any one cuisine, but has a sprawling menu on which nearly everything has a little twist. Pork pomodoro comes on toast, while a prawn toast, shaped like a filled doughnut, is actually half scallop. A quick scan reveals a hit list of chef-beloved savoury ingredients: gochujang, filetto lardato, miso, wild garlic.

Someone more joyful than me would have read through that list – 23 dishes before dessert, then five of those – and found it generous and playful. My pre-arrival scan had me wondering if this was concept first, food second. The en vogue of it all: statement scallop, busy crudo, ex-dairy sirloin, dishes flitting from Italy to China and back, seemed unfocused.

But that’s an ungenerous read of any restaurant, especially one like this, which first-time head chef Holly Middleton-Joseph opened in 2024 having just turned 30, alongside her brother Tom and their friend Christian Williams. (Tom handles the drinks programme and front of house; Christian looks after the business.) The trio, all first-time restaurateurs, have no financial backers. If they fill an extra dining room with a rotating cast of DJs, or let an Instagrammable menu lure in youngish date-night crowds, good for them. It is fun here. And, crucially, Middleton-Joseph’s food is far better than this already fun concept needs.

Here, sauce work and technique back-up all the ping-ponging about. Middleton-Joseph, who describes her cross-cuisine sampling as “poly-European with lots of Southeast Asia,” cooked at the Camberwell Arms before heading to Lore of the Land, Mountain, and then Barnes’s the Waterman’s Arms. On my second visit, with curiosity fully piqued and no date to disappoint, I started with the scallop before moving on to precisely folded cappelletti. Perhaps her deft hand with pasta came from the often Italian-leaning Camberwell Arms; maybe her bravery with an intensely savoury scallop – hers comes with lashings of XO sauce – nods to another knockout, her former chef Sam Andrews’s curry-topped rendition in Barnes. But already, just two years into Hausu, Middleton-Joseph is clearly sure of her flavours and layers them expertly.

Plenty of fuss has been made about the revival of surf and turf; but at Hausu, rather than draping a few grilled langoustines alongside a steak, Middleton-Joseph builds up XO sauce’s savoury notes with dried shrimp and the trim of that filetto lardato before spooning it over the grilled bivalve. Where plenty of chefs would understandably open with a concise pastry list of ice-cream and a tart or two, Middleton-Joseph turns out a healthy offering of rhubarb-filled eclairs and jelly-topped panna cottas.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. On my second visit, a side salad topped with thin slices of cedro (citron) felt like an under-dressed afterthought, and the sichuan peppercorn-laced praline, dusted around toasted rice ice-cream, could have used another 10 seconds or so in the Robot Coupe, for the sake of my teeth. But the cappelletti that arrived atop grated Vesuvio tomato and olive oil, pan con tomate reimagined as pasta sauce, was plain and confident and stuck in my mind long after dinner.

On my first visit, it was the monkfish, just this side of opaque, that slightly missed. But the crisp skin and wham of bisque, plus the trio of new potatoes, each elegantly turned then cooked in a salty saffron bath, made me almost forgive the touch-undercooked fish.

It is fun here. But it’s also gutsy, nuanced food under that, the kind I hope both finds the hype and outlives it. If this is Middleton-Joseph’s first chapter, I’d love to see the next one.

Hausu, 11a Station Way, London SE15 4RX (hausulondon.co.uk). Small plates from £4, large plates from £24, desserts from £5, wine from £6.50 / £32

Sophia Evans, Sophia Evans