Holly Middleton-Joseph Brings Fire, Flavor and Hi-Fi Energy to London’s Hausu

It’s a journey to get to Hausu, a hip restaurant and bar located in the London neighborhood of Peckham. But the final destination is worth the trek. Hausu shares a building with Peckham Rye station, and the vintage bathroom is the depot’s old waiting room. It was previously the Coal Rooms, a popular restaurant that closed in 2024. The owners of the Coal Rooms contacted chef Holly Middleton-Joseph, who had previously put on two pop-ups elsewhere as Hausu, and offered her a one-night residency.

“They were trying to get out of their lease, and we did a pop-up and sold it out,” Middleton-Joseph, 31, recalls, speaking to Observer in early September. “They asked us to come in for a chat on the following Monday and said, ‘Would you want to take over?’ It was as simple as that.”

Middleton-Joseph and her team made a few tweaks to the space, including a fresh coat of paint and new tabletops and chairs, before Hausu opened last October. It’s been a whirlwind, with Hausu quickly gaining popularity with both locals and those farther afield. What attracts guests is both the food, an exciting combination of modern European and globally-inspired dishes, and the buzzy atmosphere. That vibe comes in part thanks to the music, played from a vintage hi-fi system. Hausu, named after a 1977 Japanese horror film, also frequently hosts special events, like DJ nights or record store takeovers.

“[As a pop-up], Hausu was always about bringing a hi-fi sound system to each place we were cooking,” Middleton-Joseph says. “What I love about this space is that we can have a DJ downstairs in the front bar or they can be upstairs in the dining room, depending on how busy we are. It really draws people in when they’re in the front bar. And we always try to save some [room for] walk-ins, because that’s one of the good things about stumbling across a restaurant. I don’t like places where you can’t just walk in.”

Hausu is Middleton-Joseph’s first head chef gig. She got her start in cooking as an apprentice at Frank’s Bar, also in Peckham, at 21. She didn’t have a background in food and hadn’t attended culinary school, but she liked to cook for her roommates. She was part of the outdoor café’s soft launch in 2009, and immediately understood the appeal of a fast-paced hospitality job.

“I remember the night it opened, the tickets came in thick and fast,” she says. “The thing I loved about it is that you’re all in it together. It’s a bit scary. There’s panic. But once you get out of that dip, you get this uplifting feeling I love. The camaraderie and the sense of achievement, and the fact that you can learn and evolve every day.”

It was a challenge, sure, but Middleton-Joseph was eager to learn. Plus, she genuinely enjoyed cooking, especially over Frank’s Bar’s open fire. “I wanted to find somewhere I belonged. I didn’t study anything after I left school. This was the moment I found that thing I was good at. And I like being good at stuff,” she says.

The open flame has been a common denominator for Middleton-Joseph. She cooked occasionally at home growing up in Kent, but her strongest memory is helming the barbecues in her family’s yard. “For some reason, my mum let me be in charge of the fire,” she says. “I have this memory of wearing goggles because it was really smoky and trying to light this fire.”

Middleton-Joseph moved to London when she was 19 with her older brother, Tom, co-owner and head of drinks at Hausu. The siblings worked together at a nightclub before Middleton-Joseph found her calling in the kitchen, a joint gig that set them on a series of collaborations. “I worked behind the bar and I used to drink a lot,” she remembers of the club. “Tom tried to get me fired, but the bosses loved me so much they said no. But we’ve worked together at a few places, including Frank’s, the Camberwell Arms and Mountain. We’re a little duo, me and Tom.”

By the time Middleton-Joseph opened Hausu with Tom and their co-founder Christian Williams, she had enough experience in kitchens to understand what sort of atmosphere she wanted to create. A natural leader, she wanted to instill a positive vibe into her staff—no shouting and no disrespect.

“You get to set the tone of the voice that you want to be heard in the kitchen,” she says. “It’s about being firm and fair, but not shouting. It was good to be able to do that from the beginning. I’ve been really lucky with the chefs I’ve worked under. I don’t think there’s been too many dickheads, to be honest. I’ve worked for a lot of fair people, and that’s helped carve me as a head chef.”

Being a queer female chef has also shaped Middleton-Joseph’s approach. She wants to build a safe space for other queer chefs (there are a few on her team). She became more comfortable with her identity early on in her career, which she credits to her first serious relationship.

“That first relationship really solidified things for me, and I was given the confidence to say, ‘If people don’t respect you or want to be afraid of you because you’re gay, then that’s their problem,’” she says. “I became more open to the label and began to do interviews about it. Now I don’t really label myself. It depends on the space that you’re in, so I don’t label myself unless I think it can help a situation or make it better for someone else.”

She adds, laughing, “Sometimes the gay couples or lesbian couples come in to eat, and they sit on the counter. It will be two women, both looking at me, and they’re like, ‘Oh, a gay head chef!’”

The menu at Hausu is always changing, mostly because Middleton-Joseph is still finding herself as a chef. She loves having creative control, but is always open to discovery, and often tries out new dishes. “I have quite a good gut feeling about things, whether it’s going to work or not,” she notes. “And it hasn’t gone wrong so far.”

A few dishes have remained since Hausu’s early pop-ups. The chef’s upscale take on prawn toast—a Chinese takeaway staple in London—appeared on the menu the first night in the restaurant’s current space. Middleton-Joseph was inspired by the tall prawn toasts at Duck Duck Goose. “I remember thinking, ‘Not many restaurants do that,’” she says. “I always love a prawn toast from the Chinese takeaway, but they’re usually pretty crap and they’re really thin. And I thought, ‘We can elevate it. We can put scallops in it and really good prawns.’ We just amped up the flavor.”

The toasted rice ice cream, doused with a five-spice caramel, has been on the menu since Hausu’s first-ever pop-up. Middleton-Joseph conceived it while working at the Camberwell Arms. The gastropub served a homemade ice cream, so she decided to toast up some rice and infuse the milk ice cream base with it. She topped it with puffed rice and the caramel, which hits the tongue with the inclusion of Szechuan peppercorns. It’s addictive and well-balanced, countering the usual sweetness of a dessert with the spices and rice. It was one of my favorite dishes, but Middleton-Joseph says it’s not for everyone. 

“Because the caramel has got Szechuan in it, it has that numbing factor and it freaks people out,” she says. “It often divides the crowd. It’s the Marmite of ice creams.”

Middleton-Joseph’s influences are broad, so much so that it’s hard to characterize her cooking. She uses Asian ingredients like gochujang, seaweed and XO sauce alongside flavors from Italy, Spain and Greece. Fermentation is a common practice in the kitchen—the homemade pickles were so good I ate the entire plate before my friend arrived—and much of the produce comes from around the U.K. “If you like something, why not?” Middleton-Joseph says. “The sky’s the limit, and I’m lucky I can do that here. For me, it’s all about the flavors being really fun and bold and bright.”

The chef also draws on her experience working in Cambodia, where she lived for eight months in her early twenties. She initially went for two weeks, but ended up staying to work in her friend’s barcade. “They had a kitchen in the back of the bar that was empty, so I made a little snack menu of brown sugar chicken and fries with bay seasoning, stuff like that,” Middleton-Joseph says. “But then the real gig was every Friday, I would do a grill out [of] the front of the bar with food. We’d pick a different country each week, and it would be food from around the world, cooked on an open fire.”

Middleton-Joseph’s love of fire carries on at Hausu, where she prepares many of the dishes over the flames. She finds cooking a steak over the fire easier and more flavorful than in a pan, but it’s not just the meat that gets that approach. The highly Instagrammable scallop, coated in an XO cream, is grilled, as are the peaches in the smoked ricotta salad.

“All of the steak and fish come off the fire,” Middleton-Joseph notes. “Because my apprenticeship was at Frank's Bar, there weren’t even induction burners. We cooked everything on fire. If you needed to cook a pan of sauce, you would load up the fire. So from a professional point of view, that’s how I’ve been taught—just use fire.”

Soon, Hausu will celebrate its first anniversary, a milestone moment for the restaurant. And Middleton-Joseph has even bigger dreams, including a goal of landing on the 100 best restaurants list at the National Restaurant Awards. But for the chef, it’s less about proving something to the world and more about proving it to herself.

“I do have imposter syndrome, and I’ve got to convince myself that I’m good enough all the time,” she says. “I am slowly believing it. But when I look at other great restaurants that I know and love, sometimes I’m like, ‘Are we just a bit too fun? Are we not as serious?’ There are always those questions. But then you read the reviews and people come in and they say how delicious it was, and you know you’re doing a good job.”

All these years after her first night as an apprentice at Frank’s Bar, Middleton-Joseph can still feel the excitement of the job. She’s just as motivated now as she was then, if not more so. “I love it,” she affirms. “I don’t think I would be here if I didn’t love it. But luckily for me, I love a challenge and I love creating, so it feels like this is the right thing.”