Ottolenghi is an Israeli deli co-owned by Yotam Ottolenghi, an Israeli Jew, and Sami Tamimi, a Palestinian Muslim. They met in Baker & Spice in London, where they bonded over the dream of persuading more British people to eat salad. This is an ideal story of co-existence (I have met a group of Israeli Jews and Arabs dieting for peace) and I thought the new Ottolenghi in Hampstead might be picketed by idiots shouting for peace but meaning war. (Martha Gellhorn was right about slogans. Never shout them: even ones you agree with.)
It is fine in that I wish I were in the Middle East to eat the original
But this is Hampstead, not Bloomsbury, and there aren’t any pickets. Politics barely makes it here – I think it’s the hill – which is why mid-20th-century socialists loved it and bought idealised cottages from which to tell the working classes what to think. I lived here during the Foot Locker riots of 2011 and the Hampstead variant lasted about four seconds. There is an old gag about seeing a police car in Hampstead: it means someone’s garden furniture has been stolen. This is a depoliticised land and the photographs of the hostages by Sainsbury’s are only half-peeled off. That’s a happy outcome nowadays.
London’s eighth Ottolenghi is on Rosslyn Hill, surrounded by the eerie boutiques and generic coffee shops that signify any gentrified area. It used to be Carluccio’s and, before that, John Keats lived around the corner. It is decorated in the common style of the modern international rich: that is, barely at all. The tables are white plastic. The walls look like chipboard and plaster. The only colour is an alarming orange banquette. It feels as if you could close your eyes, and it would all be gone. The blurb, which is cheeringly bonkers – ‘low intervention wine list… cocktails change with house shrubs’ – is in denial about this. It thinks Rosslyn Hill is cobblestone. It isn’t.
Salads, then. Ottolenghi specialises in salads (aubergine, green bean, cauliflower, cabbage, beetroot) and it knows how to dress them. Idiots call them stolen salads, or occupation salads, or maybe genocide salads – an idiot has invented the concept of genocide oranges, though any genocide that involves the population quintupling is one any Jew will take. There are also pastries, which are less morally fraught than salads – for now.
We eat shakshuka with braised eggs and smoked labneh, and farinata with roasted mushrooms and green tahini, and scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and grilled focaccia, and buttermilk pancakes, and fruit salad. It is fine in that I wish I were in the Middle East to eat the original. Perhaps it is the closeness of Keats’s ghost, or the fact that perfect tomatoes don’t exist in Britain, or that great restaurants can’t thrive somewhere as shrivelled and uncertain of itself as Hampstead. (That’s the rich for you.) Instead, we have something that feels like a pop-up with brightly coloured food: good enough, but itinerant, and more visually pleasing than anything else. (That’s the rich for you.)
Even so, I’m glad I came. The Jew exists to be projected on to, and part of this ongoing passion play is expecting us to like pickled herring. I don’t like pickled herring. If I must have a slogan, I’ll take that one.
Ottolenghi Hampstead, 32 Rosslyn Hill, London NW3 1NH; tel 020 3761 6960.
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