From next week, visitors to Central London will be able to sit down to kosher afternoon tea in W1. Owner Lee Landau has confirmed that Reuben’s Café on Baker Street will open its doors next week. The all-day restaurant is a minute’s walk from the site of older sibling Reuben’s, which remains closed after being ravaged by a fire earlier this year.
However, in even better news for kosher diners, Landau also confirmed that the iconic salt beef restaurant is set to reopen in 10 weeks — towards the end of the summer. After earlier this year, there’d been a Reubens’ shaped hole in central London’s kosher dining options. You could enjoy Tony Page’s smart plates with a view at the glamorous ; or head to Hatton Garden for supervised sabich, falafel and cauliflower shawarma at Leather Lane site.
But that was it. With the Ottolenghi-led revolution, Israeli-style food has made it mainstream. You can’t go more than a few yards in Camden Market or East London without being faced with a fully-loaded falafel.
And you can pick up a pretty respectable shawarma or crunchy falafel in soft puffy pita served in a paper bag (or posh and plated) in many corners of London. But there was nowhere in the most central of the city’s postcodes for kosher-keeping diners to go for a comforting bowl of chicken soup and salt beef sandwich. The area had become an Ashkenazic culinary wasteland.
Kosher salt beef sandwiches set to return to W1 A sorry situation mirroring the demise of the del.