Braai Bird brings South African rotisserie to Peckham
The team behind Kudu returns to south-east London this November with a wood-fired grill built around whole chickens and its own monkey gland sauce.
Braai Bird, a new wood-fired rotisserie chicken restaurant from the founders of Kudu, opens on Nunhead Lane in Peckham this November, taking over the site Kudu itself vacated a year ago.
The move is a homecoming. Kudu, the South African-inspired restaurant run by chef Patrick Williams and creative director Amy Corbin, left Peckham for Marylebone in September 2025, folding its three separate sites into one flagship. Braai Bird puts the couple back on Nunhead Lane, this time with a single, tighter idea: chicken, cooked slowly over wood, and not much else on the menu beside it.
The format is a braai in the South African sense, an open wood fire rather than a gas grill, feeding a rotisserie that will run through service. Williams is overseeing the food, built around whole birds basted and finished with the restaurant's own sauces, including Kudu's signature monkey gland sauce, a sweet-and-savoury glaze standard across the kind of South African braai cooking that shapes what to eat in Cape Town, despite the name. Sharing sides fill out the rest of the table.
A wood fire and a rotisserie, doing one thing, in the room Kudu built its name in.
A wood grill built for whole birds
The kitchen sits at the back of the room, open to diners, with the wood-fired rotisserie positioned as the room's working centrepiece rather than tucked away. That is a deliberate contrast with the gas ovens most London rotisserie chains rely on for volume; wood brings a slower cook and a smokier result, at the cost of throughput.
Braai Bird is a narrower proposition than Kudu, which ran a full à la carte menu. Williams and Corbin are betting that a single, well-executed format travels further in a Peckham market that already has strong competition for casual, affordable dinners.
Interiors that keep Kudu's spirit
Corbin has worked with Lithuanian designer Liga Piraga on the room, retaining structural elements of the old Kudu Grill site rather than stripping it back to a shell. Bespoke artwork by South African artists carries over the visual identity the couple built at Kudu, even as the format itself changes.
It is a smaller bet than the Marylebone flagship, and a return to the neighbourhood where Kudu first built its following before the group consolidated there. For Peckham, it replaces a well-known address with a new one from operators the area already knows.
Braai Bird Peckham opens on Nunhead Lane in November, with booking details to follow closer to launch.
