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. London looms larger for me now I ignore most people: I am even considering mud-larking.
The exterior is greenish – a popular colour, because it evokes the natural world, the garden we have lost, because we wanted another shopping mall. But, once you slink in on a weekday afternoon, you are happy enough. It is beautifully wrought in cream and bronze. It is modern and understated – not usually to my taste, but spring is no time for dining in restaurants that look like White’s.
It is everything that Yotam Ottolenghi’s newish place in Hampstead should be,
but isn’t
If it is all understated, at which I gawp, as I said – I am not used to understated Jews, but I understand they do exist, particularly at law firms – the food is not. It is everything Yotam Ottolenghi’s newish place in Hampstead should be, but isn’t. (I sense over-exposure and, in fairness, Hampstead mothers deserve no better. They are always reserving tables for fictional beings and howling at their dogs.)
We eat an immaculate houmous with tomato roe and shifka peppers (as ever, the simple dishes are the hardest to make well); lamb and venison koftas with pistachio cream (it’s hard to overstate what kebab shops have done to the reputation of the kebab); grilled chicken with ras-el-hanout, roasted sweet potato purée and sweet potato strings; quinoa tabbouleh; a burrata with nuts; a kadayif nest with vanilla cheesecake cream, caramelised pecans and an orange peel reduction (I would rename that if I were their PR); chocolate mousse with olive oil, coffee and urfa chilli shards. It is all exceptional.
I refuse to engage in the cultural appropriation debate, which is just shouting and the quite offensive suggestion that Jews just can’t eat salad. If there were no Jews in Israel 2,000 years ago, we couldn’t have killed Jesus, could we? We hardly did it from Krakow. Think of the donkey – the ass? – miles.
The pre-theatre menu is £27.50 per head: it will delight you. Restaurants of lost Jewish Poland can wait.
Delamina Townhouse, 3-15 Tavistock Street, London WC2E 7PS; www.delaminakitchen.co.uk
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