Raw ambition: meet the restaurant group on a mission to ‘democratise’ ceviche in London

“This is the secret to our success,” says Crudo Cevicheria co-founder Maria Yanez as she sets down a trio of shot glasses in front of me. It’s the middle of the day… well, 3pm, on a Monday; way too early in the week for hard liquor, one might think. The first shot glows with a rich green liquid; the second has a sharp, orangey tone; and the third has a striking, pinkish tinge. The aromas that rise from the three glasses combine fresh notes of spice and citrus that are almost overwhelming. I stare at them and fear that quite an aggressive hangover may be in my immediate future.

Thankfully, for both my liver and my head, Yanez is quick to make clear that none of the shots actually contain alcohol. Instead, they each hold one of Crudo Cevicheria’s house-made leche de tigre; literally translated to mean ‘tiger's milk’, and the base ingredient used to cure the raw fish in the restaurant’s namesake dish.

In total, Crudo Cevicheria, which launched in London’s Fitzrovia back in 2019 and now has three sites across the capital, offers five different styles of leche de tigre – each one developed by Yanez and her partner, Carlos Socorro, with whom she runs the business. They include a traditional, Peruvian-style blend; a Japanese-inspired one that’s made with ponzu; a Mexican mix featuring jalapeños; and an extra spicy option made with habanero chilli.

“Although obviously the most popular association that people have with ceviche is of Peru, most countries along the pacific coast produce their own style of the dish – and that’s why we’ve developed these different styles of marinade,” continues Yanez. “We’re not a Peruvian restaurant, we’re a cevicheria. Our focus is on exploring the different flavours and interpretations of ceviche.”

Democratising ceviche​

Yanez and Socorro arrived in London seven years ago, having previously lived in the US. “We met in Miami, where we used to work,” says Yanez. “Over there we were regularly able to get ceviche for a reasonable price in a grab-and-go or street food setting, but when we moved to London, we realised that wasn’t the case here. There were a few places with good ceviche, but it was either traditional Peruvian restaurants or higher-end places.”

Thus, the pair hatched a plan to try and democratise ceviche and create a concept that served the dish as a takeaway option at an approachable price point.

The idea was to take a site with a limited footprint that could hold one or two seats inside but was primarily targeted at the grab-and-go lunch market. Using money they had already saved, the pair secured their first site on Riding House Street in Fitzrovia, which opened in September 2019.

“Great timing,” says Yanez, somewhat wryly. “Everything ran smoothly to begin with. We chose the site as it had a heavy footfall, and for the first few months we were almost doubling our sales week on week. It was a great location, and the concept was a hit with office workers. But then everything changed when the pandemic came.”

Taking its cues from the poke movement, of which it shares a lot of DNA, the restaurant menu launched with a short selection of ready-designed ceviche bowls, with guests also given the choice to build their own. Options included the clásico ceviche with sea bass, traditional leche de tigre, quinoa, avocado, sweet potato, cancha corn and plantain chips; and a nikkei bowl with salmon, ponzu leche de tigre, sushi rice, wakame, edamame, crispy onion and nori seaweed. As with the city’s poke restaurants, prices hovered between the £8 and £10 mark.  

So popular was the Fitzrovia site that on the week that the first national lockdown was announced in March 2020, Yanez and Socorro had been preparing to sign the lease for their second London outpost, this time on London’s Old Street – another grab-and-go site, albeit one with space for a handful of tables for eat in diners.

Once lockdown had begun to ease the pair decided to take on the site, but by that point had also begun to look at evolving the concept and moving away from the grab-and-go space.

Rethinking the concept​

Being forced to close Fitzrovia just as it had hit its stride was a huge setback for Yanez and Socorro, but almost immediately they chose to remain open as a delivery-only operation. “Deliveries had been selling well since we launched, so it made sense to try and keep going if we could,” says Yanez. “It was almost more to keep our sanity than anything else, but we learnt a lot from that time.

The pair did a lot of large catering for the NHS, and had a number of local offices that asked them to send bowls to their workers at home. “We had to learn on the go, but the whole experience helped ground us.”

“We had to to rethink the concept in order to ​
give customers more of a reason to come and see us”​

Curiously, it wasn’t the pandemic itself that propelled the pair to reassess the Crudo Cevicheria concept, it was the aftermath once restrictions began to lift. “It was almost as if we had gained too much presence on the online food delivery platforms, so when we reopened, we found that we had barely any customers coming into either store. We had almost become a dark kitchen operation.”

Yanez recalls the time a delivery driver parked p outside the Fitzrovia site, collected an order and then proceeded to walk just a few doors down the street in order to deliver it. “I mean, I could have done that for them and saved them the delivery charge,” she says, still clearly bemused at the incident. “That was what propelled us to rethink the concept, in order to give customers more of a reason to come and see us.”

From grab-and-go to a full-service restaurant​

Using the Old Street site as a base, Yanez and Socorro begun to explore moving Crudo Cevicheria into the full-service dining space and developing it into a restaurant experience. “There was an appetite for people to come to us for a more leisurely meal at lunchtime, and it also meant we could try and tap into the evening trade. We were lucky as the risk was minimal. We already had the space to try this out and our thought was if it works and customers like it, then maybe this is the direction we can go into.”

The new-look menu ran a selection of snacks and small plates, alongside a range of ceviche and larger tiradito – sashimi – dishes that could be served at both lunchtime and dinner, with the pair opting to launch with a short menu and develop it if the concept worked.

Dishes included an avocado and beetroot tartar made with orange-ponzu, spring onion, sesame seeds and crispy onion; and an octopus dish featuring Peruvian criolla sauce, lime, extra virgin olive oil and La Vera valley smoked paprika, with prices starting at £5 to £7 for snacks and smaller plates, rising to between £10 and £15 for the larger fish dishes.

To ensure as broad a reach as possible, the Old Street site also continued to serve the lunchtime ceviche bowls, which could be ordered for eat in and takeaway between 12pm and 5pm each day. While sales remained consistent, it was the new all-day menu that proved to be the bigger draw. “We learnt in Old Street that we could do a dining concept,” says Yanez with a smile. “And so, then we began looking for the opportunity to develop that further.”

Fast forward to the beginning of this year, and Crudo Cevicheria now has three sites all offering the all-day menu. Alongside Old Street, Yanez and Socorro have recently opened what they’ve dubbed their ‘first dedicated full-service restaurant’ in Hackney; and, in a sign that the new concept is very much here to stay, they’ve also relocated their Fitzrovia restaurant to a larger space on nearby Foley Street to add more covers.

The Hackney restaurant, located on Mare Street, now forms the base for Crudo Cevicheria business and dish development. Unlike the other two sites, it is only open in the evening and doesn’t offer the original ceviche bowls as part of its menu. “Mare Street is a more defined restaurant space,” explains Socorro, who oversees the kitchen across all three sites.

“We’re putting on a lot of specials at the moment and using the space to experiment. That includes using some more premium products like scallops. The customer response has been good. The flexibility we have there is great as it’s a bigger kitchen and the idea is to take what’s successful there and use them as specials in our smaller sites in the future.”

While current issues with the site’s electricity supply prevent them from doing so, the aim at Hackney is to also introduce a small selection of hot dishes to complement the ceviche and tiradito plates, which will always remain the focus of the menu. “We want to be able to some hot dishes, but it won’t be a core part of the menu,” adds Yanez. “I always think that people go out and eat sushi for dinner, which is primarily served cold. And our customers are happy to come out now and not get a hot dish. Our focus will always be on ceviche first and foremost, and that’s still the main seller in the evening across all our sites.”

Building a bigger profile​

Crudo Cevicheria launched at an interesting moment. A month after it opened on Riding House Street, Martin Morales’s Peruvian restaurant group Ceviche, which is credited with helping to popularise the raw fish dish in the capital when it first arrived in London back in 2012, fell into administration following what it described at the time as being an ‘incredibly tough’ 18 months of trading. The group, which also included the Andina brand, was subsequently acquired by Rosa’s Thai Cafe founders Alex and Saiphin Moore and now operates just two restaurants having previously had a six-strong estate.

Despite its similarities with poke – a mainstay of Hawaiian cuisine that sees raw and marinated fish served over rice in a bowl along with various toppings, and which has long been a trendy lunchtime choice in the capital thanks to the success of James Gould-Porter’s Island Poke and, more recently, the Italian-founded Poke House – ceviche has never appeared to connect as well with London diners. Indeed, Crudo Cevicheria is arguably the only ceviche-focused brand in the city that’s currently pushing for further expansion.

 “When we moved to the UK, it was still rare to find somewhere​
 with ceviche on the menu. ​But over the course of recent years, there​
 is more awareness of it as a dish and it is more popularised”​

Yanez and Socorro agree that ceviche still doesn’t have a big profile in the capital, but they believe the brand they’ve developed has the scope to change that. “What makes sense to us is we’re specialised in ceviche rather than being a broader South American or Peruvian restaurant,” says Yanez. “When we moved to the UK, it was still rare to find somewhere with ceviche on the menu. But over the course of recent years, there is more awareness of it as a dish and it is more popularised.

“We’re in a good position to make the most of this growth. Having a specialised product that we’re known for and having small sites is a big strength. Plus, we’ve demonstrated that we’re a nimble business and able to adapt.”

While the expectation is that Crudo Cevicheria will primarily remain rooted within the full-service restaurant space, Yanez and Socorro aren’t planning on turning their backs on the grab-and-go market. As well as continuing to offer the bowls for takeaway at both their Fitzrovia and Soho sites, the pair are about to launch a new outpost in Covent Garden’s Seven Dials area. Despite the more fast-casual nature of the location, the plan is to serve both the ceviche bowls and the all-day menu.

“What Shaftesbury Capital [Seven Dials' landlord] liked about us is our ability to transition from a casual, grab-and-go lunch focus to being more of a small plates and snacks concept in the evening; and that’s what we’re looking to create in that space. It’s a great opportunity and it give us a much bigger platform to push the brand forward.”

Both Yanez and Socorro speak of wanting to take the brand further in the future – including potentially exploring other opportunities in the QSR space and opening another full-service restaurant – but for now the focus is on making sure the mechanics of the business are finely tuned.

“With four restaurants having opened in a small amount of time, our focus for the next year or two will be to slow down, catch our breath and focus on consolidating what we’ve created across those sites,” adds Yanez. “And then we’ll look at where those next opportunities are.”