Max Rocha's Canal-Side Room Where the Guinness Bread Runs the Show
An Anglo-European kitchen tucked behind Broadway Market where Irish heritage, Italian training and a very small dining room converge.
The Guinness bread arrives dark and warm, cut thick, and once it's on the table the rest of the meal negotiates around it. This is the thing to know about Café Cecilia before anything else: the loaf is not a courtesy, it's the argument. Max Rocha wants you to eat bread made with stout from his mother Odette's Irish kitchen, and then he wants you to eat it again as ice cream at the end. The rest of the menu — the mackerel, the ravioli, the sage and anchovy fritti — is the frame around that idea.
Rocha opened the room in 2020 in a converted canal-side building on Andrews Road, a five-minute walk from the noise of Broadway Market and psychologically much further. His CV is River Cafe, St JOHN Bread & Wine, and Spring — which reads exactly like the food tastes. Italian technique, English ingredient discipline, Irish sentiment. His sister Simone designs clothes; he runs a dining room that dresses in the same restraint. White walls, grey marble bars, wooden tables, black-and-white photos on the walls, and the open kitchen visible from every seat.
The Guinness bread and its ice cream are the reason to book, and everything served between them is the frame that makes them make sense.
Editorial Deep
The kitchen covers a narrow band and covers it well. Snacks like the sage and anchovy fritti, a rotating pasta course (the ravioli when it's on), one whole-fish dish (usually the mackerel), the steak-frites for the room's more conservative diners, an artichoke salad, and then the two closers: deep-fried bread and butter pudding, and Guinness bread ice cream served with more of the bread. That's essentially the shape of it. Rocha isn't doing tweezer garnishes or five-component plates. He's cooking things that were cooked at River Cafe and St JOHN and letting the ingredient carry the weight.
A Wednesday lunch crowd skews women in their thirties in expensive knitwear, a handful of art-and-fashion couples from the Simone Rocha adjacency, one or two solo diners with a book and a glass, and the occasional food-writer type doing quiet reconnaissance. By 1pm the room is full and the volume rises to a proper hum without ever tipping into the shouting-across-the-table register you get at Manteca or Brat. Dinner brings a slightly dressier version of the same crowd — the East London evening uniform, minimal jewellery, a lot of navy and cream.
You'll walk in from Andrews Road, past the canal, into what feels for a moment like the wrong door — the building doesn't announce itself. Inside, someone finds your name quickly and walks you the short distance to a table. Service through the meal is warm and attentive without any of the performative River Cafe-descendant chirpiness that afflicts a lot of the London rooms in this lineage. Staff know the menu, know the wine list, and pace a two-course lunch to finish inside ninety minutes when that's clearly what you want.
The set lunch is the reason to visit at that hour and skipping it to piece together an à la carte version of the same meal means paying more for food that arrives from the same kitchen. If the set is available on the day, take it — the à la carte will still be there at dinner, when it becomes the point.
A Saturday breakfast, 9am, canal light coming through the windows, one other couple in the room, Guinness bread and coffee and nothing else on the table. This is the visit that makes the case for coming back — Café Cecilia at breakfast is a different restaurant than Café Cecilia at Saturday dinner, and it's the version most people never book. Weekend mornings run 9am to 10:45am and are the easiest slot to secure.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Guinness bread, sage and anchovy fritti, mackerel, Guinness bread ice cream
“The bread, the light and the wine list are why people come back to Max Rocha's canal-side room. Kitchen fireworks are not on offer.”
Book the midweek set lunch or a weekend breakfast rather than a Saturday dinner. For bigger cooking at similar money in the same postcode, Manteca is the harder-hitting alternative; for a quieter room with a better wine list, Café Cecilia wins.
The Verdict
