Delamina Townhouse is on Tavistock Street in Covent Garden. It is an Israeli restaurant, and a very fine and subtle one, though Israeli restaurants are rebranding as ‘eastern Mediterranean’ these days due to growing Jew hate on London’s streets, which fills me with rage. (I am not talking about criticism of Israel. I welcome all criticism. I am a critic. I am talking about demonisation, and the glib urge to annihilation. Plenty of restaurant critics have a line on the war. I have checked.) But not enough rage to stop eating.
I ate for Ukraine at Mriya in Hammersmith: now I eat here. If you think I am decadent, well, I am hardly the only one. You are lucky. I nearly did an Israeli restaurant in the part of Krakow that is a haunted Jewish Disneyland called Jewrassic Park, but you would hate me if I sent you there. English tourists cry in Poland. They stand on town squares, hating their travel agents and wishing they were in Italy instead. Hell, I nearly did the café at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but it isn’t very good, and it has a death camp ice-cream mark-up, and you wouldn’t thank me for that either.
And, ah, Delamina Townhouse is restful as Israel is not, partly, of course, because Covent Garden is stripped of people you might wish to meet – Eliza Doolittle, for example, and the staff of the Lady – and is all high-end tourists and frightened commercial barristers. It is almost impossible to remember it was once a market, let alone a garden, but you can still smell the river.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in