I am taking my mother’s cousin Norma and her husband Harry
out to lunch and I want them to have a good time, not just because I love Norma to bits but also because... nope, that’s it actually. She used to babysit us when we were little and would make us eat our supper backwards, saying if we didn’t finish our icecream there would be no main course, absolutely not, no way, and even though our bedtime was meant to be 8 p.m. we’d all still be up at midnight when she would shout: ‘All of you... time for... CAKE! And I mean IT!’ So I loved Norma then and I love her now. As for Harry, he seems very pleasant (only joking, Hazza!).
Anyway, it’s not that easy taking Norma out for lunch. First off, she is an observant Jew, so kosher, and secondly she has a horror of answering the telephone, as I do. We don’t properly understand where this horror comes from, why we have to leave the answer machine to pick up every call, but think it has something to do with the possibility of the call containing a nasty surprise that we might have to react to on the spot, which would be tiresome. I have a similar horror of answering the door when I’m not expecting anybody, but this is because I fear it might be the bailiffs, the VAT people or some born-again nut who wants to talk about how God sent his son, in which case I always want to say, well, if that’s the case, you’d think he’d offer to babysit for mine every now and then. I might add that I haven’t been a great fan of Jesus ever since secondary school where I was known as the Christ Killer, particularly by the RE teacher who would round on me in class and ask, ‘Why did you kill him, then?’ Dunno. Bored? One of those parties that just got out of hand? Sorry.
Still, after weeks of leaving messages on each other’s machines, we eventually settle for the Bevis Marks Restaurant one Friday lunchtime. This restaurant, which is in the City, is not only kosher but also shares a wall with Bevis Marks synagogue, the oldest surviving synagogue in Britain, built by Sephardic Jews in 1701, for £2,500, when builders were reasonably priced and probably turned up too, plagues and smallpox notwithstanding. Our booking is for 1 p.m. but my son and I are rather late, I’m afraid, for the very small reason that when we come out of the Tube at Aldgate I navigate holding the A-Z upside down. You may even say I’m navigating via the Z-A. Still, he is forgiving, and only refuses to talk to me while we retrace the mile or so we’ve walked out of our way. ‘I’m sorry,’ I keep saying, ‘I really am. I haven’t been as sorry since I personally killed Jesus.’ Which I haven’t.
The synagogue is actually quite tricky to find. It’s in a little courtyard off the main drag, as it had to be, because when the synagogue was built Jews were still forbidden from building on high streets. There is a security guard at the courtyard gate. I really can’t work out just how much anti-Semitism there is around today. Although, that said, I recently read Andrew Wilson’s biography of Patricia Highsmith who so hated Jews it’s almost thrilling. ‘If Jews are the chosen people,’ she once wrote to a friend, ‘then that is all I need to know about God.’ ‘If Jews aren’t the chosen people,’ I would have written back, ‘how come we’ve always avoided anything that involves shorts or jumping around in a sporty way? That absolutely has to be the mark of a superior race, surely. Now, put that in your pipe and smoke it, you raving old lesbo.’ When we finally make it, past the beautiful old brick façade of the synagogue and into the restaurant that’s been constructed at the back, Norma and Harry are already seated. The dining-room is fresh, light, white with a glass roof (it opens, apparently, in the summer). There are some modern abstract paintings, but they appear totally mediocre compared with the view you get of the old synagogue’s incredible chandeliers through the windows. The waiters are attentive and light-footed and unobtrusive, which is weird, as we are all used to Blooms, where they are anything but, and say, ‘What, you don’t want the steak? What are you, too poor?’ Even when they’re not saying anything they make you feel as if you are intruding on their personal grief somehow.
OK, down to business and the menu which, I would say, is modern British/kosher with a nod towards Jewish favourites, like chicken soup and salt beef. I have the chicken soup with matzo balls (£5.95) to start. The soup has good colour (dark golden) and good body but, if I were in the quibbling mood, I’d say it could be a little saltier. My son, though, is wildly happy with his linguine with roasted vine tomatoes, pine nuts, pesto and wild rocket (£6.50) while Norma thinks her chopped liver with spiced fig compote (£6.95) is perfectly fine, but perhaps overpriced. Now, on to the salt beef with home-made frites and horseradish relish (£16.90) which Harry has as his main. Harry says, ‘I don’t like to complain but... ’ which is the Jewish way of saying, ‘Hang on, everybody, I’m now about to complain quite a lot.’ He is pretty sure, he says, that the salt beef has been carved from a cold joint and then reheated, perhaps even in a microwave. It’s the way the meat curls up at the edges that gives it away. And it is thinly sliced, he continues, whereas salt beef should come in great thick slabs. It’s also served without the fat and, as everybody knows, the fat is the best bit. Norma has the rib-eye steak with frites and tomato and mustard seed chutney (£17.90) but cannot enjoy it at the price. ‘The steak is teeny, teeny, teeny. It’s a lousy bit of steak,’ she keeps repeating. My sea bass with mango salsa, wild rocket and citrus jus (£14.95) is lovely and fresh-tasting and zingy but also undersized. I’ll say one thing for Blooms: their chops might taste like old leather stitched on to bones but they don’t half pile it on. Pudding? We all have the fresh fruit salad (£4.95), which has very hard lumps of melon in it.
Perhaps Friday lunchtime is not a good time for Bevis Marks, when everyone is cranking up for the Sabbath. Only a couple of tables are occupied. A number of items are off the menu, like the lamb rack and halibut. By 2.30 p.m., having spent £130 on a meal (with no wine), the waiters are packing up around us and practically stacking the chairs on tables. When we get the hint and depart, which is quite promptly as it’s making us feel most uncomfortable, we have to retrieve our own coats from the cloakroom because there is no one around to help us. Actually, the trouble with Bevis Marks isn’t the food so much, which is surely overpriced, but the lack of atmosphere, the absence of any Jewish shtick. On one trip to Blooms, the waiter decided to take his lunch break half way though serving me. When he reappeared an hour later, so did the rest of my order. This, strangely, is just the sort of thing we like. It might have something to do with being the chosen people.
Previous page
