By, Josh Glancy
3 min read
ByJosh Glancy, Josh Glancy
There is a sign on top of what used be to the Spitalfields Great Synagogue on Brick Lane that reads "Umbra Sumus", meaning "We are shadows". It is drawn from an Horatian ode, in which the venerable Roman poet coined the expression: "We are but shadows and dust". (Movie buffs will recall this mantra being delivered by a dying Oliver Reed to Russell Crowe's Maximus in the film, Gladiator.)
Walking around Brick Lane today, one catches little more than shadows of what was once the epicentre of Anglo-Jewry: a faded menorah grafted on a wall, a decaying mezuzah in a doorpost, and the bagel shops at the top of the road, last outpost of a swift-moving Yiddishe empire.
Hanbury Street, just off Brick Lane, is particularly full of Jewish ghosts and shadows. Number 40 was a kosher butcher, home to a study circle and a blacksmith. Further down the road, the Brady Centre now houses offices for Tower Hamlets social workers. Those whose memories stretch back before the war may remember the Brady Girls' Club as something very different, a place where plays were rehearsed, gossip was traded and gymnastics performed. A plaque marks this building's previous life.
These are the shadows, faded into the cityscape and crowded out by the new residents, Hindus and hipsters. But, as of this month, there is a new form of Jewish life on Hanbury Street in the form of Jago, an Ashkenazi-themed restaurant started by chef Louis Solley. At first glance, Jago is purest triple-distilled Shoreditch. It is designed to be at one with its natural surroundings by a pair of star Spanish architects. It forms part of Second Home, an office space for tech-startups.
But take a look at the menu and it is something quite different: kabanos, goulash, pickled herring and the restaurant's signature dish of salt beef and chrain (which work surprisingly well together).
It feels strange to be eating chrain on Hanbury Street. Sixty years ago, it might well have been Simons's chrain, produced by my grandpa Harold in a factory just down the road. Grandpa's chrain would have been far stronger though: it kicked like a Krakovian mule. He was the authority on all things horseradish. Each Seder night he would waft the maror under his well-tuned beak and pronounce on its sinus-busting potency.
I think of him as I sit in this smart, new incarnation, drinking imported lager and gazing up at the collaborative start-up hub space thing that overlooks the restaurant. Is this connection anything more than just nostalgia? Does it actually mean anything at all to be eating Jewish food in the old Jewish East End?
Jago is one of several hip London restaurants to serve Jewish-themed food. There is the Ottolenghi empire, Jerusalemite Palomar in the West End, and Mishkins, an American-style deli that offers a fairly anaemic impression of a lower east side Reubens for theatregoers in Covent Garden.
A part of me is cynical about all of this. At its heart, this is what hipsterism is. The superficial grafting of old traditions on to contemporary consumerism. A veneer of authenticity which seeks to disguise the hollow mass-produced abyss that is modern culture.
In food terms, this produces restaurants that would work equally well wherever they are in the world. The restaurant may draw on Ashkenazi influences and be situated among the hidden Hebraism of Hanbury Street but in reality it's not much more Jewish than the Lahore Kebab House down the road.
Chrain doesn't really belong here anymore. We left the East End behind. We moved on. A couple of years ago, I lived in Mile End, paying London rents to live just off the Mile End Road. My family complained. "It took us three generations of hard work to leave that dump, why do you want go back?".
I was quite taken with the romanticism of living back in the old neighbourhood. But this was imagined. It has of course changed beyond recognition, and amid the fried chicken shops and gastropubs there wasn't even a shred of soul-warming haimishe nostalgia to be found.
But it doesn't do to be negative about the rise of Jewish-lite cuisine. In a way it is quite reassuring. Judaism today is cool, hip, edgy. It says to people: New York, Hackney, Jerusalem. We're good at food, so it's nice that the world gets to share our passion. In Jago's case, the food is delicious, which is all that really matters in a restaurant anyway. After all, if you want real authenticity then go home for Shabbat dinner.
And Jago can still achieve something because so much of cultural Judaism is about food. It binds us to our ancestors, creating unbroken chains of cholent eaters stretching centuries back into the darkness of Poland.
If you sit in Jago and close your eyes, then the chrain and the salt beef can take you somewhere that words never can. It can take you into the shadows and the dust. It can take you to your ancestors.