The former train station ticket office that boasts Britain’s best bacon butties – plus a damn fine cup of coffee .

You can’t mess with the bacon sandwich. A crispy slice of salted, cured meat, dressed with sharp, tangy ketchup, cradled in between two soft, springy slices of bread. What could be better? As anyone who has ever been hungover can testify, it’s a formula that is unimproveable. At least, that’s the received wisdom. This is why it’s rather daring that Mr Sam Bryant, head chef of new south London eatery the Coal Rooms had decided, for want of a better expression, to improve it. The key innovation? Coffee.

The Coal Rooms is an all-day restaurant housed in a 1930s-built former ticket office next to Peckham Rye station. As you might expect from its name, the fine art of flame grilling and smoking is at the heart of its menu. Mr Bryant, formerly of London’s Smokehouse and The Princess of Shoreditch, was lured to join as head chef after learning of its kitchen, which is furnished with a giant clay smoker and robata grill. He’s evangelical about the benefits of cooking on coal. “When you’ve got a fatty piece of meat on coals, and the fat’s dripping through and hitting the coals and creating smoke and steam… you get this perfectly rendered down piece of meat with a smoky heat to it,” he says. “It’s second to none.”

However, expertly cooked meat is not all there is to it. What’s particularly unique about the Coal Rooms is the way the space and menu have been designed to suit its location (next to a station) and the attendant customer base. So, in addition to the more traditional dining room area at the back of the restaurant, the Coal Rooms offers bar seating overlooking the kitchen (for lunching local office workers) and a “grab-and-go” area designed specifically for commuters, who might be in a rush. Here, you can self-serve filter coffee and pay via an honesty box, meaning you don’t have to wait in line while someone does it for you. This is also where you come for the bacon sandwich.

“The bacon sandwich was an easy choice,” says Mr Bryant. “What does everyone want for breakfast? A bacon sandwich.” But from this obvious conclusion, Mr Bryant has taken an obscure route, inspired by the fact that the group that owns the Coal Rooms also has stakes in local coffee businesses Spike & Earl and Aside, plus social enterprises Old Spike Roastery and Change Please. “These guys are coffee roasters,” says Mr Bryant, “so we were thinking about what we could do with that. Then we did some research and found this Brazilian technique of curing the bacon in coffee. That made perfect sense.” The process he then came up with is labour intensive, but yields spectacular results.

“We cure the whole slabs of bacon for a week in coffee, maple syrup, sugar and salt,” says Mr Bryant. “Then we slow cook it in the smoker overnight.” To cook it in the morning, he says, they fire up the robata with a tiny bit of coal as well as special “coffee logs”, manufactured by eco-fuel company Bio-Bean from the Coal Rooms’ waste coffee. These burn with a flame that has a rich, chocolatey fragrance, lending an extra hint of coffee flavour to the bacon. It doesn’t end there. For the bread component, Mr Bryant has created what he calls an “English brioche” bun, made from butter and custard powder. Condiment-wise, he’s created a homemade ketchup and brown sauce. And in the serving of it, he’s introduced measures that supply both drama and convenience. “We wanted to have it more like a carvery,” he says. “The chefs will bring out the haunch of bacon, put it down, and carve it in front of you. Because it’s ready to go, people shouldn’t have to wait. They’ll come in, order the bacon sandwich, sit at the counter and the chef will call the cuts off – you can either have back or fat, or you can have a mix of both.”

Hungry yet?

The Coal Rooms will be serving its bacon sandwich from 4 September 2017