Telephone: 020 8954 9998
Address: 11 Buckingham Parade, Stanmore, Middlesex
Meal for two, including drinks and service, £35
If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: man cannot live by tagliatelles au romarin, truffes blanches du piedmont et fricassée de cèpes alone. For a start, the white truffle season is tiresomely short. Then there is the more fundamental issue. I know this may be hard to believe, but sometimes - just sometimes - I crave simplicity. I crave comfort food. And naturally, at these moments, my thoughts turn only to Stanmore in north-west London. Enough with your jus already, I shout; bring on the Jews.
For however devout an atheist I may be (and, by God, I am), and however little time I have for the rituals of the tribe of which I am a part, there is still something about the taste of a fine piece of salt beef which speaks to a fundamental part of me. The fundamentally greedy part of me. On this, I and my wife, the shiksa, disagree. She thinks the phrase 'Jewish cuisine' is an oxymoron; that it is all drek. While I accept that it's not exactly refined (or, to be precise, that if someone is trying to refine it they're not doing it right), I do believe that Jewish food beats allcomers when it comes to feeding the heart or at least the arteries. Anyway, it was a cold, dark winter's night, she had gone off to her mothers and so I went off to mine. Together we went, my parents and I, to Madisons Deli, a non-kosher Jewish eatery on Buckingham Parade in Stanmore.
Madisons, which describes itself as a 'salt beef restaurant', is a modestly funky place of bare floors and clean, hard, cafe tables and plate-glass windows plastered with posters advertising early-bird deals which apparently bring the alter kackers (Yiddish for old farts) from miles away. What they make of the collection of Craig David gold discs on the wall, a gift from his manager, a member of the owner's family, is uncertain, but the menu will be utterly familiar. These are the great Ashkenazi staples - chopped liver, egg and onion, tongue, pastrami, worsht and viennas - which have kept Eastern European Jews in good spirits and heartburn for generations. There's even gefillte fish, both fried and boiled. I should say here that on the latter my wife and I totally agree. Boiled gefillte fish is terrible stuff even when done right.
I did not try the boiled gefillte fish, but I'm sure it's the way those deviants who claim to like it want it, because everything else is. There is a selection of soups, mostly variants on each other, mostly costing just under £3 a bowl and all delivering the marvellous, soothing antibiotic kick of pukka chicken stock. I had mine with kneidlach, beautiful feather-pillow soft dumplings that were nothing like mamma used to make... thank God. The same soup with kreplach, little meat dumplings, also got the maternal nod of approval.
We moved on to huge platefuls of echt salt beef at around £8 a throw, which was deliciously tender and fibrous alongside rustling bowls of chips and crisp, golden latkes the size of flattened grapefruits. New green cucumbers were salty and garlicky with just the right amount of crunch. Service was affable and efficient. We finished with a serving of lokshen pudding (lokshen is a kind of vermicelli that can turn up in chicken soup) and apple strudel. Neither was over-sweetened. The lokshen pudding was dense in the middle and crisp on top, as it should be, and the pastry on the cinnamon- spiked strudel fare flaked away.
A word of warning on drinks. The wine list is short and, from what I tasted, untroubled by glory, which is as it should be. Going to a Jewish restaurant in search of a good glass of wine is like visiting a nunnery in the hope of finding an expert on fellatio. All that wine list proves is that Madisons Deli is the real thing.
