Bloom's
130 Golders Green road, London NW11 (020 8455 1338).
Meal for two, including service, £60
I once said that bad restaurants were like car crashes and chest infections, in that they were never sought but were, instead, something that just happened to me. After my dinner at the Jewish restaurant Bloom's, in Golders Green, northwest London, I realised the analogy goes further. You also feel the effects for days afterwards, too. Every time I let slip an involuntary belch, which was often, I was right back there at the table - and that was not a good place to be. Never has the late John Diamond's great joke about Jewish keep-fit lessons - eat three bowls of lockshen pudding, press your hand to your chest and say, 'Feel the burn' - been so true.
My wife, the shicksa, says I have no one to blame for this but myself. She believes the entire repertoire of Eastern Europe's Ashkenazi Jews is very bad food, and that my affection for it comes from a blindness brought about by entrenched cultural associations. I think she is both wrong and right. I would never argue that this culinary tradition - which makes a virtue of chicken fat, the deep-fat fryer and the boiling of perfectly good pieces of meat - is refined. But I would also say that there is both good bad food and bad bad food. The food I was served at Bloom's was, for the most part, very bad bad food indeed.
It should not have been this way. Bloom's is an institution. Mind you, so is Broadmoor, and nobody ever went there for dinner. Still, it has lineage, stretching back decades. There used to be two of them, but the Whitechapel branch closed a decade ago partly because it mislaid its kosher licence. Recently I learned that the interior of the Golders Green outpost had been given a makeover, and indeed it has. It is all sleek booths and shiny glass panels. Out has gone the mural of Jerusalem street life. In comes something in rainbow shades depicting the wandering of the Jews through the desert. It has odd touches, not least that Moses appears to be holding the Ten Commandments at the mouth of the divided Red Sea as the children of Israel trail away into the distance, leaving him behind. Perhaps they had worked out where he was taking them for dinner and were trying to escape.
Let me tell you what's good. The new green pickles were good. They were crunchy and garlicky, as they should be. The coarse and earthy chopped liver with which I started would also have been good if it had not travelled so swiftly from fridge to table. As for everything else, it might have been better if it had stayed in the fridge and not troubled the table at all.
My companion, a food blogger called Silverbrow (google 'Silverbrow on food'), who takes the blame for my eating here, ordered the fried gefilte fish. This mixture of sweetened and minced white fish should be crisp on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside. This one was flat, the size of a dinner plate and denser than Jade Goody. I imagined it having its own gravitational field, and dragging planets out of alignment. I tried a little with some crane, a mixture of beetroot and horseradish, and was immediately reminded of my paternal grandmother. This was not a good thing. I didn't like my father's mother.
For my main course I ordered salt beef, which, done right, is a thing of beauty. This was done wrong. It was extraordinarily dry for something which spends the entire cooking process in liquid. I had also asked that it not be too lean. A little fat is what makes the dish; it adds a rich slipperiness to the soft meat. Instead, they brought it out with a lump of fat on the side, and I was supposed to combine the two myself. This isn't how it works. The fat should be attached and then you pretend you are simply eating your way through dinner, rather than actively making yourself a candidate for angioplasty. The latke it came with was merely the hot, salty cousin of the gefilte fish.
Silverbrow's gedempte meatballs, served in a gloopy cornflower-thickened sauce the same shade of orange as Dale Winton, were, if anything, worse. 'Gedempte' usually means long cooked, so that they fall apart. Here 'gedempte' took on an onomatopoeic quality, as of the sound a boulder makes when dropped into water. They were solid, as though the meat had been blitzed to a paste before cooking. None of this was cheap. Think £18.90 for the salt beef and £12.50 for the meatballs.
We pushed on to dessert because we are Jews and this is what we do. Both the apple strudel and lockshen pudding, a curious confection of sweetened noodles with sultanas, had a flaccid texture and violent heat, as if warmed through in the special fast oven. They came with custard which was watery and, unlike these two diners, thin. The menu optimistically invites its clientele to 'taste the quality'. The best I think you can hope for is to feel the width.
