Three Nights a Week Above a Peckham Waiting Room
The room above Hausu runs Thursday to Saturday only, takes no reservations, and pours a menu ninety percent different from downstairs. The Buttered Rum Espresso Martini is the one to end on.
The Buttered Rum Espresso Martini arrives thick enough to hold its foam, the salted butter cutting through the espresso in a way that reads more like dessert than a nightcap. It is the last drink of the night by design, and the reason to walk up the mahogany staircase in the first place. The room above it — red curtains, exposed brick, a set of 1970s classroom chairs pulled around low tables — is a listening bar in the proper sense, with vinyl running from jazz to post-punk and a rotating DJ programme filling the gaps.
Tom Middleton-Joseph runs the bar; his wife Holly runs the kitchen downstairs at Hausu, the restaurant that opened in October 2024 in the former waiting room of Peckham Rye station. Both came through Frank's Cafe and The Camberwell Arms, and Tom was on the launch team at Mountain. The upstairs bar is a separate operation from the restaurant below — a different menu, a different door policy, a different rhythm entirely. Most people who know Hausu the restaurant do not know the bar exists.
The only cocktail room in Peckham working at Tokyo-listening-bar technique, and it opens three nights a week.
Editorial Deep
The programme is technical without being showy. Clarified milk work on the Salted Iberiko Tomato Martini produces a yellow-tinged pour that reads like a savoury aperitif. The Blood Orange Sidecar arrives with a fig foam that holds its shape long enough to matter. The Gin, Kiwi and Coriander Soda is the low-ABV order for anyone starting early or pacing a long night.
Conversation is possible at a normal volume, which is the first thing that distinguishes this from the newer wave of Peckham bars. The vinyl runs at a level that fills the room without dominating it — jazz early, something harder later, a DJ taking over toward midnight on the busier nights. The vaulted windows look out over Peckham's new public square, and after dark the room glows amber against the brick.
Peckham locals in their thirties, a spillover from Frank's Cafe up the road on warmer nights, and the small number of central London drinkers who have worked out that the best cocktail room in SE15 runs three nights a week. It is not a scene bar in the Dalston sense — the crowd is here for the drinks and the records rather than to be seen — and the room stays legible even at eleven on a Saturday. Arrive by nine if you want a seat; by half ten it is standing along the back wall.
Individual cocktail prices are not published, and neither the venue nor recent coverage has put a figure on the list — worth arriving prepared to check the menu on the night. What is clear is that the room sits well below the West End cocktail-bar tier and reads as fair for the technique on the glass. The à la carte bar is the order to make.
This is the best cocktail room south of the river on the nights it is open, and the only one in Peckham working at this level of technique. Come back on a Thursday for the quieter version of the room, or a Saturday for the DJ programme running late. The limit is the calendar: if the night is Sunday through Wednesday, this bar does not exist, and the walk from the station is wasted. Check the day before booking the trip.
Order this
Drink this.
Buttered Rum Espresso Martini; Plum and Rhubarb Sour; Coconut Daiquiri
“The best cocktail room in Peckham — but only Thursday through Saturday.”
Go on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday evening for cocktails built with technique the rest of Peckham does not attempt, in a vaulted first-floor room above the former station waiting room. Walk in, take a low table by the windows if one is free, and end on the Buttered Rum Espresso Martini. Skip if the day is Sunday through Wednesday — the bar does not open — or if the appetite is for a scene bar rather than a listening room. The downstairs restaurant is a separate operation; the upstairs list is almost entirely different and more adventurous.
The Verdict
