Fay Maschler reviews Camberwell Arms

Charcuterie is made in-house and is offered as just one of several dishes to share. I suppose this could lead to squabbles but it also invokes generosity and can underpin camaraderie and bonding, especially when there are more than two at a table. As a matter of fact, there is only one table for two at Camberwell Arms. Valentine’s Night must have been interesting… but I don’t think it was open then.

Jars of pickles and preserves on high shelves look as if they have been humming away for a while, maybe brought over from Frank’s Café in Peckham — founded by Frank Boxer — where Davies was previously cooking and also creating events for Bold Tendencies, commissioner of art projects.

Seasonality nicely impinges. Examples in the dinner and lunch I tried are calçots (long green onions that in Catalonia give rise to festivals and eating competitions) grilled to patchy black and served with fresh cheese and romesco sauce; morels in guinea fowl galantine and wild garlic garnishing gnocchi baked with Taleggio cheese.

Bread is taken seriously and furnishes a little amusement arcade of its own with the choice of grilled focaccia to dip into a wholly likeable soupiness of onions and red beer or hot toast spread with pork fat spiked with Scotch bonnet peppers.

There is a spit-roast and a charcoal grill onto which mussels are also tossed, giving them the sooty edginess of an éclade, and there are savvy good-husbandry notions such as composing minestrone from cured meat, pecorino and mint; putting together quail with nduja and fregola and selling one quail for £13, two for £18.50; using longhorn beef offcuts for a lasagne for two, and spreading chunks of buttered stale bread with Seville marmalade for bread and butter pudding.

Camberwell Arms is not alone is responding ebulliently, reasonably and decently to the business of eating and drinking — I could give you a list of places and run out of fingers to count them on — but it does seem unusual in its insouciant unified sense of purpose. Giving people what they want — and probably more than they expect — seems the guiding principle. Siobhan and Rebecca are two staff who could teach the world a thing or two about waiting on tables. They are backed up by chefs in blue-and-white striped pinnies who join in with service if it seems useful.

Weekday dinner with a couple of friends is notable for the chilli-hot crouton, those aforementioned calçots with almond-nibbled fiery-red sauce and the calming cheese, singed mussels with bacon plus chargrilled octopus with confit potatoes, pickled onions and paprika to start plus a huge, film- star-handsome Barnsley pork chop — a cut across the loin of a big pig lacquered to shiny, treacly darkness — and the Longhorn beef lasagne. With the pork come chopped greens in a silky cream sauce. The standout in the charcuterie also added to our first-course order is fragile slices of meltingly soft mortadella.

As well as the marmalade bread and butter pudding, in the dessert course we try pistachio meringue with baby pink rhubarb and a slightly stiff chocolate and maraschino cherry pot.

At Sunday lunch, when the clientele ranges from a baby that seems just to have been born to people even older than us, Reg and I decide to share spit-roast chicken with roast potatoes, watercress and aioli. I try to eat watercress every day — it is my genuflection to health-consciousness. The Sasso chicken is a big beast; half gives us quite a lot to take home. We could have together tucked in to grilled chopped rabbit — if Reg hadn’t grown up in the period blighted by myxomatosis — served with Swiss chard and Jerusalem artichoke gratin, or slow-cooked mutton neck with dauphinoise (the shoulder is offered for five to carve up).

Camberwell Arms pays due attention to the drinks list, with what look to me like interesting beers (what do I know?), the aperitifs one pines for and recognisable cocktails, not concoctions with loopy names. Wines start at £15 a bottle for a Vin de Pays D’Oc and wend their way upwards — mostly across Europe — acknowledging the current leaning towards organic and biodynamic bottles.

Happy as a clam, the cap was set on my contentment when the soundtrack segued into Bob Dylan singing Just Like a Woman — “Nobody feels any pain…” How true that is at Camberwell Arms.

65 Camberwell Church Street, SE5 (020 7358 4364, thecamberwellarms.co.uk). No bookings. Open Mon 6pm-10pm. Tues-Sat noon-2.30pm & 6pm-10pm. Sun noon-4pm. A meal for two with wine, about £84 excluding service.