Meet Rocola, Mare Street’s New Restaurant That Refuses to Stand Still
Rocola isn’t really interested in being the same restaurant twice. The new Mare Street opening from the team behind Crudo and Tiny Wine combines a permanent East London bar and dining room with a rotating cast of chefs, menus, tastings and collaborations.
Named after the Spanish word for jukebox, the idea is simple enough: the room stays put, but what is playing inside it changes. On The Knife's recent visit, that meant a residency from Colombian chef Sebastian Becerra and a menu moving confidently through tiradito, aguachile, barbacoa and plenty of chilli.
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Rocola comes from Crudo Group founders Maria Yanez and Carlos Socorro, the Venezuelan duo who launched Crudo Cocina Latina in 2019 before expanding the concept across London and later opening Tiny Wine.
Their latest project feels a little looser around the edges. There is still a permanent Rocola identity – Latin American roots, Southern European influence, good wine and the sort of food that encourages several plates appearing in the middle of the table – but the kitchen has deliberately been built to accommodate other voices.
Guest chefs, residencies, wine tastings, music nights and collaborations are intended to continuously alter the rhythm of the place. You might visit for dinner one month and encounter an entirely different chef the next.
Hence the name. A rocola is a jukebox: choose another record and the sound changes, even if the machine remains the same. It's a neat metaphor, but more importantly it does make sense as a restaurant.
Sebastian Becerra Takes the Kitchen
Rocola launched its residency programme with Dublin-born chef Nico Reynolds, whose cooking draws together Jamaican heritage, Irish produce and time spent living and cooking in Buenos Aires.
By the time The Knife arrived, another record was already spinning. From 4th to 22nd August, Colombian guest chef Sebastian Becerra took control of the menu with what Rocola describes simply as "Modern Latin American" cooking. It resulted in a compact menu that jumped enthusiastically around the continent without becoming tangled in its own ambition.
There was tuna and watermelon tiradito with ají amarillo, red chilli, spring onion and furikake; beetroot aguachile sharpened with tomato, cucumber, coriander, guajillo and ancho chilli; and tuna tartare served with rocoto jam, ponzu and corn chips.
Even padrón peppers were given a Rocola makeover, arriving with whipped ají amarillo feta, toasted cancha, red amaranth and togarashi.
It's precisely the kind of cooking the residency format should encourage: familiar enough to order without a glossary, but given just enough freedom to veer off in unexpected directions.
Turn Up the Heat
The larger dishes pushed things further. Grilled elote hummus combined sweetcorn, sesame, confit garlic and jalapeño with rocoto focaccia, while mussels and prawns found their way into linguine with ají amarillo cream, Brazil nut pangrattato and achiote oil.
Pork belly came with salsa tatemada and burnt spring onion cream, while barbacoa lamb chops were paired more simply with pea shoots, lime and fried cassava.
And because apparently plain fries have now been outlawed in East London, Rocola's arrived loaded with ancho chilli, Parmesan, coriander, truffle mayo and absolutely no intention of behaving like a side dish.
The point isn't that every residency will cook like this. Quite the opposite. Becerra's menu is interesting because it demonstrates how much latitude Rocola is willing to give the chefs coming through its kitchen. The restaurant provides the stage rather than forcing everyone appearing on it to perform the same act.
Margaritas, Mezcal and Sobremesa
That revolving food offer is anchored by a drinks programme with rather more permanence. Building on the team's experience at Tiny Wine, Rocola plans a list of roughly 60 to 80 bottles, with a healthy proportion available by the glass and an emphasis on producers the team genuinely wants people to drink rather than a checklist of fashionable regions.
Cocktails, unsurprisingly, lean Latin. During Becerra's residency, Margaritas came two ways: one combining passion fruit and Scotch bonnet, another hibiscus and jalapeño. Elsewhere there was a banana Daiquiri, Mezcal Paloma and Caribe Gin Sour with grapefruit and passion fruit.
More intriguing still is the Sobremesa, mixing Diplomático Mantuano rum with Cynar, Aperol and coffee. The name refers to that wonderfully unhurried period after eating when nobody feels any particular urgency to leave the table.
Rocola seems specifically engineered to encourage it.
Small Room, Big Ideas
Part of Rocola's charm is its size. With only 10 counter seats and around 14 to 16 more around tables, the venue is considerably more intimate than the endlessly expanding restaurant concepts London has become accustomed to.
The kitchen is completely open, making chefs part of the room rather than distant figures hidden behind a swing door. Exposed concrete and an intentionally stripped-back interior give things an industrial East London feel, but without allowing the design to become the main attraction. Instead, you watch dinner being cooked.
That becomes particularly effective when the person cooking changes every few weeks. At a traditional restaurant, an open kitchen offers theatre. At Rocola, it also provides an introduction.
The Restaurant as Residency
London has no shortage of chef pop-ups, guest dinners and kitchen takeovers. They usually exist outside a restaurant's everyday identity: something temporary inserted into the calendar before normal service resumes.
Rocola flips that relationship; change is part of normal service. There will always be food, wine and cocktails here, but guest chefs, artists and producers aren't being treated as occasional interruptions. They're part of the restaurant's reason for existing.
That makes repeat visits unusually appealing. Restaurants ordinarily spend enormous amounts of energy trying to ensure you receive broadly the same experience each time you return. Rocola is effectively promising the opposite.
The clever bit will be ensuring that, as the chefs and menus change, the restaurant itself remains recognisable. So far, the jukebox analogy feels surprisingly apt. Same room, different record. And on Mare Street, it may be worth coming back just to hear what plays next.
