The martini at Dockley Road is fat-washed with beef tallow from the butcher two doors down, and the bar you drink it at is made from melted carrier bags. The restaurant opened quietly in Bermondsey’s wholesale food district almost a year ago and is only now saying anything about it.
Dockley Road sits in the south-west corner of Spa Terminus, the run of railway arches behind Bermondsey where London’s specialist food traders actually work: butchers, fishmongers, cheesemongers, bakers, coffee roasters, wine importers. Most of it is wholesale and most of it is shut by lunchtime on a Saturday.
What that means for a restaurant sitting in the middle of it is a supply chain measured in metres. The menu changes almost daily, because it is written around whatever the neighbours have that week.
Who is behind it
Co-directors Alex Keys and Klaudia Weisz, both out of Rochelle Canteen, opened it in October 2025. Keys cooks, with St. JOHN also on his CV, and in 2025 became a founding member of Farmer Tom Jones Butchers at Spa Terminus, which is the detail that explains the kitchen.
Weisz runs the floor and the drinks list, and spent her most recent years as restaurant manager at Rochelle Canteen. The room seats 45.
Beef, all of it
The whole-animal approach is not a line in a press release here, it is the reason a butcher is a co-owner of the problem. Large-format bone-in steaks and the lesser-seen cuts, flat irons, merlots and denvers, sit at one end. Roasting and braising cuts move through terrines, pies, braises and ragù as the seasons turn. Bones go into stock. The trim ends up in the house burger, made with Farmer Tom Jones.
Around the beef, the cooking is broadly British and European and deliberately unfussy: roast cod from Henderson’s and Câr-y-Môr with provencal vegetables, Dillay Dexter ragù with pappardelle and 24-month Parmesan, and, as autumn lands, gnudi with roasted squash and crispy sage, and a venison and pickled walnut pie.
Weekend breakfast from 9.30am is the underrated part: Turkish eggs, scallop and bacon baps, smoked haddock kedgeree, with pork from Eddington Farm running through the terrines, sausages, bacon and the ham in the eggs benedict.
The drinks, and the martini
The wine list leans low-intervention and local in the literal sense, with beer, cider and wine from Spa Terminus neighbours The Kernel Brewery, St. JOHN and Dynamic Vines. A run of central and eastern European bottles from The Jolly Merchants nods to Weisz’s Hungarian background, which is where the genuinely unfamiliar things are. Plenty by the glass and carafe, and a decent number of bottles under £40.
Cocktails run from a straight Negroni to a Blackcurrant Margarita and a Gimlet Berry Cordial, with the fruit syrups made from second-grade fruit that would otherwise go. The Dockley Martini is fat-washed with tallow from Farmer Tom Jones, which is the same animal logic applied to the bar.
Bar snacks are built for lingering: cod bites with aioli, and a Mon’s Cheese toastie with summer truffle.
The room
The brief was 1970s domestic warmth inside a working industrial unit, and the exposed concrete and resin floors were left where they were. The bar top is the thing to look at: a custom surface by Brighton studio Weez & Merl, made from recycled plastic bags coloured and compressed into something that reads as marble until you get close.
A bespoke cabinet by local maker Dean Slydell doubles as waiter station and wine display, a local welder built the steel storage above the bar, and the bathroom wall carries a collection of historic menus from the restaurants that shaped the pair’s careers. There is a terrace outside.
Klaudia and I are both slight maximalists, and we’d both like the space to slowly and gradually evolve to have more personal touches as the restaurant lives on.
Alex Keys, co-director, Dockley Road
The London x London Take: the interesting thing about Dockley Road is not that it sources well, because everyone says that. It is that the sourcing is not a claim you have to take on trust, it is a five-minute walk you could do yourself on a Saturday morning when the arches are open. Go on a Saturday and make a morning of Spa Terminus first, then eat lunch there. Order the beef, whatever form it is in that week, and have the martini even if you do not normally, because a drink washed in beef fat is either a gimmick or a genuinely good idea and you will want to know which.
Need to know
- Where: Dockley Road, 1 Dockley Road, London SE16 3AF, at Spa Terminus
- Open: Wednesday and Thursday 4pm to 9pm; Friday 12pm to 2.30pm and 4pm to 9pm; Saturday 9.30am to 2.30pm and 4pm to 9pm; Sunday 9.30am to 2.30pm
- Breakfast: from 9.30am on Saturday and Sunday
- Price: mid-range, with a number of wine bottles under £40
- Nearest station: Bermondsey
- Booking: dockleyroad.co.uk
More south of the river? Our guide to things to do in Southwark covers the rest of the area, and the best restaurants in London has where else to eat.
