Bara Café is bringing Caerphilly, cockles and cosy Welsh chatter to South East London
There’s a brand new café in Peckham, and it’s all about Welsh food. Bara Café is believed to be London’s first spot fully dedicated to celebrating Welsh produce and cuisine, and just weeks after opening in February, every table is full.
The bakery and sandwich shop champions ingredients sourced directly from Wales, from Caerphilly cheese to Pembrokeshire shellfish and coffee from Ammanford. Behind it are Cecily Dalladay, a quarter-finalist on MasterChef: The Professionals, and chef Zoë Heimann, who say the response has left them ‘absolutely knackered’ but thrilled.
Cecily said the idea was sparked by a remarkable coincidence involving a vintage family cookbook. She added: “About a year ago, I was looking at doing some Welsh food just generally… I found this old Welsh cookbook from the 1950s and it was really cute.
“About two weeks later, my dad texted me saying he found one of my grandma’s books, and it was the exact same cookbook that I’d just bought two weeks earlier, but it had all of her little annotations in it – that’s where the inspiration came from for the café.”
For Cecily, Peckham felt personal as well as practical. She said: “I think there was a lack of sit-down cafés in Peckham… my mum’s best friend, who’s also Welsh, lives one street away, so I’ve always been coming to Peckham since I was a child, especially this area – so it just kind of felt natural.”
Since opening on February 12, the pair say the Welsh community has shown up in force. Zoë said: “It’s been really busy every day since we’ve opened, we’re absolutely knackered, but we’re really happy that people are responding so well to it and there’s been such an amazing community of Welsh people in London who’ve flocked to here.”
“I’ll be standing in the bread kitchen and people on the table in front of me will be chatting in Welsh which is really nice to hear.”
MyLondon couldn’t resist paying them a visit. The space is cosy and filled with families, with a low hum of conversation occasionally punctuated by the sound of Welsh being spoken across the room.
The menu is a love letter to Welsh produce, from eight-hour smoked Welsh beef brisket with melted Caerphilly to breakfast focaccia stuffed with smoked bacon, buttered leeks, cockles and laverbread. Weekends bring Pembrokeshire lobster rolls and crab rarebit, while the counter is stacked with fresh bakes.
I had to try the bara brith, a traditional Welsh fruit loaf made with tea-soaked dried fruit and spices, served warm with thick Welsh butter melting on top. I’m not even a fruit cake person, but this was delicious, especially paired with coffee from Coaltown Beans that tasted distinctly fresh.
For Cecily, the café is also about changing perceptions. She said: “I think people know very little about Wales – mostly people talk about Gavin and Stacey and Tom Jones – but there’s so much more to Wales and so much to the food and ingredients we’ve got.”
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