A guide to Jewish food in LondonFifty places to eat: delis, salt beef bars, restaurants, beigel/bagel shops and more
This article is a part of Vittles British Jewish Food Week. To read the rest of the essays and guides in the project, please subscribe below: Key AH – Andrew Humphrey A guide to Jewish food in LondonFifty places to eat: delis, salt beef bars, restaurants, beigel/bagel shops and more
Delis and ShopsShalom Hot Bagels Bakery Patisserie Delicatessen
Shalom Hot Bagel Bakery sits on the side of a dual carriageway off one of the six points of Gants Hill roundabout in an overlooked part of Ilford in the Borough of Redbridge. In the 1970s, Redbridge hosted one of Europe’s largest Jewish populations (around 30,000) and was a microcosm of Jewish life, with kosher bakeries, butchers, restaurants, banks and schools. A thriving community still existed until the mid-2000s, when younger families began moving further out into Essex and beyond but also back to more central areas like Golders Green and Stamford Hill. Now, Shalom Hot Bagels and the Chabad Lubavitch centre, which sits across the roundabout, are the last bastions of the area’s Jewish community. Shalom doesn’t look like much from the outside but inside it is a triple threat of a counter service (bakery! patisserie! deli!), where display cases are crammed with smoked turkey breast, four types of salmon (Canadian, best, oily and dry), fish balls, latkes, gefilte fish, herring, tubs of chicken matzo ball soup, potato salad (both skin-on and skinless varieties) and shelves piled with bagels, platzels, challah, rugelach and babka. There’s hand-painted signage, dry goods stacked against the wall and fridges filled with fresh pickled cucumbers. Essentially, Shalom is a more compact version of NYC’s Barney Greengrass or Russ & Daughters that – if it had been located in Manhattan – would have already hosted an Aimé Leon Dore photoshoot and welcomed droves of in-the-know tourists, eager to snap the aesthetic of the interior and their haul of nosh for the ’gram. MA Deli 98
Deli 98 may seem impenetrable to outsiders, but the manager, originally from Belgium, lights up the moment you ask him a question, offering up menu suggestions and history, pointing out his favourites or suggesting when is best to come to get an even wider choice. It also remains the only place I’ve visited in London that sufficiently meets the expectations set by my late father’s voracious-yet-discerning affection for Hebrew National hot dogs. I hereby officially withdraw my original statement that the UK was devoid of such a thing – this one even comes in an oversized challah bun. AKK Reich’s
Reich’s, a small deli at the bottom of Golders Green Road, is named for Nachman Reich, a quiet and reserved man who is exactly what you might imagine if you were casting a Hasidic caterer. He has it all: the size, the beard and the heavily accented English. He’s also renowned for his extreme generosity and kindness, a communal legend who is very much a personification of the food he’s famous for: heavy, hearty, understated, soulful and heimish. Reich’s has been doing this heimish food for almost 40 years and has become the undisputed king of the North London kiddush – the reception after morning prayers. Here, you might find deli staples like salmon and salt beef, but they play second fiddle to the real stars – cholent, kishke and kugel – calorific food cooked overnight so it falls within the limitations of Sabbath observance. This is ‘low and slow’ before East London discovered it.
Growing up, nothing beat the excitement of knowing that you had the full-on fress of a Reich’s catered kiddush coming up. Even now, as an adult with broader horizons and a more developed palate, it still excites me: cholent, a stewy sludge of brown potatoes, beans, barley, brisket and marrow fat, and kugel, an oversized, tray baked rosti. If you can’t get invited to a Reich’s kiddush, go to the takeaway on a Thursday or early Friday (cholent and kugel just doesn’t taste right on other days of the week). Brace yourselves for queues and expect to be ignored by the harassed staff. You may well need to help yourself – that’s what I do because I’m no good at waiting. A bowl will set you back less than a fiver. You might be able to finish it. You’ll definitely need a lie-down. BB Oren Deli When Oded Oren’s restaurant on Shacklewell Lane first opened, I initially wrote it off as another MiddleEastMediLevantian restaurant to add to the pile. I was wrong. What won me over wasn’t the showstoppers like Barnsley lamb chops with zhoug, but Oren’s way with bread: arayes made from hake stuffed into pita and brushed with lamb fat, the effect somehow accentuating the taste of the fish, like salt on caramel; or oblong flatbreads topped with anchovies, confit onions and sour cream; or a just-baked whole challah, glistening like a bodybuilder on Muscle Beach. There are places in Paris where you would sit through a whole meal to get to the patisserie; you might have done the same in Oren, just so you could start with some pita and tomato. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Oren’s second restaurant is not a restaurant but a deli in London Fields, where you can just have the bread. My favourite thing to do is to buy a challah with dips from the fridge, which veer from a chopped liver so lush you could use it as face cream, to exceptional egg salad and schmalz herring, all the way east to zhoug, hummus and preserved lemons. Add in the hot Sephardi meals to takeaway, the kind of butch, uncommercial stews you’d never get at Ottolenghi (Libyan chraime with hake kofta!), and you maybe have the most complete Jewish food establishment in London. JN Platters Deli You may think that popping to Platters in Temple Fortune for your bagel accoutrements, just because it’s next door to Daniels Bakery, is an easy thing to do. And sure, it is. But the deli, which is heading into its 44th year of business, would stand very much on its own even if it didn’t have the perfect delivery system for its products just coincidentally sitting on the other side of the wall. If you’re veggie, get the egg and onion, or the cream cheese; if not, smoked salmon or chopped liver. You also need to buy the gefilte fish, both kinds (boiled and fried). The place is always briskly busy, with people shouting for what they need right now before the bagels stop being warm. (There is such a thing in my fam as the ‘bagel window’, aka the optimum couple of hours you get to eat Daniels’ not-quite-cooked bagels before they get cooler and harden, it’s a bit of a dance.) It’s worth braving the queues, especially at the weekends, because the staff move fast and are extremely nice. Get some latkes for the side. LT Moshe’s Food & Deli Moshe’s in Temple Fortune is the kind of shop that seemingly carries one of everything, as if it places orders based on a running community suggestion box. It’s kind of all here: kitsch, functional, modern living mixed with ancient Jewish traditions, a section to pick up Shabbos and yahrzeit (memorial) candles, a Passover-for-one ready meal, ‘Ma Nishtana pops’ in the frozen food section and a pickle section that would warm even the coldest Ashkenazic heart. It’s got a sushi bar. It’s got herring. It’s got pastries. It’s got an entire wall filled floor-to-ceiling with kosher wine and alcohol, a Tupperware and partyware section to match, and enough kosher sweets and pot noodle options to satisfy any child’s after-school needs. Though clearly purpose-built to serve the kosher-keeping Jewish community, this is the kind of shop I’d imagine anyone would enjoy wandering through, stumbling across something they didn’t know they needed but now can’t live without, like the twirly Passover-themed straws complete with matzo or wine glass characters fixed to them (it’s customary to drink four glasses throughout the seder ritual) that I didn’t buy before the holiday started and have been regretting ever since. AKK Kosher Kingdom When I visit, I usually fill my trolley in the aisle devoted to chicken soup accoutrements: bright yellow croutons (delicious) or chicken-flavoured soup mix (mostly MSG, also delicious). However, it’s the fridge, filled as it is with disgusting-delicious Ashkenazi delights – chopped liver, egg and onion, and gefilte fish – which fills my soul. I resist the urge to turn my nose up at Sushi Haven, Candy Corner or the Munch ‘n’ Crunch salad bar. Their less-creatively named, non-Jewish siblings can all be found down the road at Finchley Road Sainsbury’s. Kosher Kingdom is the 400m sq heart of London’s Jewish community: bountiful, generous, self-preserving and a little bit silly. At the height of the pandemic, it commissioned Stamford Hill singer Shloime Gertner to record a song. “Let’s stay safe and protect each other” boomed down the aisles of Kosher Kingdom for the best part of a year. No expense spared, the shop even re-recorded versions for Jewish holidays. As we learnt in Love Actually, nothing says festive remix like squeezing in an extra syllable to a line: “If the matzo aisle is busy, go to a different aisle…” TS Panzer’s Things change; businesses diversify (see sushi bar), industrial shelving is replaced by bespoke pine, prices rise (a loaf of challah now costs £5). Some things, however, don’t. Panzer’s bagel recipe is the same as it was when they opened in 1944 and the bagels are good. They’re £1.10 each (do not buy one toasted with butter for £3.80 + service). You can still get Baron’s New Green Cucumbers (£4.50, 75p more than at Shalom Hot Bagel), which are the best pickled cucumber a person can buy and, behind the illuminated signs and artfully arranged vegetable towers, tiny Jewish grandmothers are still asking shop assistants to fetch them disposable roasting trays from the jaunty tower on top of the freezer. The ‘new’ Panzer’s is a terrible compromise between new and the old, Britain and America, Jews and gentiles. It’s a nightmare, but I love it. I can’t in good conscience recommend it, but I can’t stop going either. MPS Beigel and Bagel ShopsThe White One and The Yellow One Subscribe to Vittles to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Vittles to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
|
