Tish, 196 Haverstock Hill, London NW3 2AG (020 7431 2828). Starters £8-£16. Mains £14-£29. Desserts £4.50-£8. Wines from £23

Just after our waitress had finished taking our order at Tish I looked up and said, “Is there any question you’d like to ask me?” It sounds terribly passive-aggressive doesn’t it, this interrogation, but don’t worry. Tish is a kosher restaurant in Belsize Park, north London. The room was full of Jews and if there’s one thing my people have nailed it’s passive-aggressive. Our waitress shrugged at her notepad and said: “Meh, I don’t think so.” Then she went, “Actually… Who’s having the soup and who’s having the salt beef sandwich?”

Ah, the salt beef sandwich. The question I was waiting for her to ask was, “Fat on or fat off?” You can have lean salt beef. Of course you can. But it’s a bit like unsalted chips or clean, sanitary sex. I mean, what’s the point? Back in the day when Russell Norman of the Polpo Group announced he was opening a New York-style deli called Mishkin’s, serving salt beef, I forced him to have lunch with me. I lectured him on how the waiters had to ask whether you wanted the salt beef with fat on or fat off. He took notes. When they opened his waiters asked the question.

So anyway, Mishkin’s closed, and now here’s Tish, by Belsize Park Tube with one of those big outside eating areas at the front, under a plastic-walled marquee, like you get at cheap weddings. Inside the restaurant proper is brightly lit with a central bar, an open kitchen and soft furnishings. There’s a toilet area with lots of floral prints on the walls, because they’re very forgiving when there’s a risk of staining. It is filled with real Jews, not part-timers like me. There are many yarmulkes on display, and middle-aged women I may well have tried to snog when we were all 14.

You only need look at this crowd, at the way they interrogate their plates and eat while talking to each other, to know they do not regard this as some fancy dinner in a restaurant. It’s evening and they have to eat, so what the hell, why not eat here instead of in their own kitchens? Saves on the washing up. Most of them know each other. There is a lot of waving across the dining room and stopping by tables. It’s delightful and also, awful.

The menu is trying to be all things to all (of these) people. It’s pretending to be a normal restaurant just like the non-Jews have. So there’s seared tuna and a duck breast dish and a lamb pie with truffle mash. But, well, you need to know your market so, of course, there’s chicken soup with lokshen (noodles) and there’s schnitzel and there’s ox tongue and there’s a salt beef sandwich. Look, here it comes, with a bowl of crisps on the side as if it’s a weekend lunchtime around your great aunt’s house. Or maybe round my great aunt’s house. She was called Muriel and she liked to feed. I liked to eat. We were well matched. I miss her.

I conduct a forensic examination of the sandwich. There’s much lifting and poking. Now I understand why they didn’t ask the question. Because, of course, it comes with fat on. Who would want salt beef without the fat? There’s a sliced gherkin in there and sauce, and some green stuff which my colon will thank me for. It’s a very good salt beef sandwich, which it really ought to be at £15.50. The chicken soup is also a beautiful thing. It is crystal clear but full of depth. Come here when you are on the edge of death or have a minor cold, one or the other.

If you’re not kosher for God’s sake don’t come here for the steak or the dairy-free ice cream. Why do that when you can go to a restaurant where the steaks bleed and the ice cream involved a cow, like it should? I think my antipathy towards the picky-eating god of the Jews is well known. I’m fully expecting to hear soon that the Jewish Lord has discovered he’s gluten intolerant and, while we’re at it, that lactose brings him out in hives.

For my main course I order the gentleman’s schnitzel. That’s a veal schnitzel with a fried egg and capers. It turns up without the egg or the capers or, as it happens, the veal. She’s brought me a chicken schnitzel. I express dismay. She says: “We’re out of veal.” I say: “You didn’t think to tell me?” She shrugs and offers to get me something else. I tell her not to. (It reminds me of the story of the Jewish wedding where the chopped chicken livers were served in the shape of a carp because they didn’t have a chicken mould. True story; I put it in a novel.) It’s actually a nice chicken schnitzel. A seabass fillet with artichokes and a vegetable casserole is a solid bit of Mediterranean cooking. There’s a red cabbage and beetroot coleslaw which could keep the dry cleaners in work for months, and chips which rustle.

Dessert is a game of two halves. There’s a lokshen pudding, which is compressed, set noodles with sultanas. It is dense and claggy and possessed of its own gravitational field. So, basically, it’s perfect. A gooseberry strudel is an arrestable offence. The pastry is undercooked. The gooseberry filling is under sweetened. Haven’t my people suffered enough?

The all-kosher wine list is peculiar. It has only a handful of Israeli bottles, despite the country’s wine sector having developed significantly in recent years, and most of the ones they do have aren’t mevushal (it’s hocus pocus involving boiling of wines so that non-Jews can handle them. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. Like I care.) We drink a sauvignon blanc from France which is an awful lot better than the kiddush wines which gave me a headache when I was a kid.

Some restaurant reviews are consumer journalism. They tell you whether a place is worth your money. Others, like this one, are pure observational journalism. They are a snapshot of life. Tish is a bustling, noisy restaurant, frequented by a particular community. It’s already full and will stay that way. They do a good salt beef sandwich and a good chicken soup and a fine schnitzel and a terrible strudel. But unless you actually do keep kosher all you really need to know is that it’s there. It’s one for the k’nossers. That’s Yiddish for connoisseur.

News bites

Any talk of salt beef sandwiches leads inexorably to thoughts of the Brass Rail inside Selfridge’s Food Hall on London’s Oxford Street. I last wrote about it to moan about a less than helpful change to the purchasing system. A few years on and they seem to have sorted the problems. The salt beef and pastrami are still as good as ever. I am also addicted to their pickles (selfridges.com).

Since 2016 the community-based Orchard Project has been liberating tonnes of apples and pears from London’s private gardens and public parks which might otherwise go to waste. They are then turned into cider. Lottery funding is coming to an end, so they have launched a fund-raising drive. Visit crowdfunder.co.uk and search localfox.

Online food delivery business Just Eat has announced it is to start displaying food hygiene ratings for the outlets it represents. The trial will begin in Northern Ireland early next year, covering 600 restaurants, with a national roll out planned for later in 2019 (just-eat.co.uk).

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1