‘The only fancy kosher restaurant in central London’ — Jay Rayner reviews Tony Page Marylebone

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Of all the fancy kosher restaurants in central London, Tony Page Marylebone has to be the best. It is also the only fancy kosher restaurant in central London. You can tell it’s fancy because the chicken soup with matzo balls comes topped with a bamboo dim sum steamer, like a jaunty hat, containing noodles, carrots and chopped thigh so you can complete the dish yourself. You never got that at my Great-Aunt Muriel’s house. It’s good chicken soup, as it damn well should be. If they can’t get chicken soup right here, it would have caused a broigus, which is Yiddish for “I could make that better at home”. Kind of. Sadly, the menu here is not about great Jewish Ashkenazi staples like chicken soup. It’s about other things. That’s where it all gets trickier.

Not that the uneven cooking seems to bother tonight’s packed house, a crowd that other restaurants can only dream of on a Tuesday night. Sometimes, it seems, people come to a restaurant regardless of the food, rather than because of it. In matters of strict kosher observance, they trust Tony Page because for decades he has catered high-profile events everywhere, from The Dorchester hotel to Blenheim Palace to the Guildhall in the City. For many years, he also had a kosher restaurant in the Royal Lancaster hotel close to Marble Arch.

Recently, he moved it here to what was previously an outpost of the Japanese-Peruvian group Chotto Matte. Little has been done to the space, which feels like the clubhouse of a 1960s James Bond baddie lair as designed by Ken Adam, only with more solicitous henchmen. There are black-painted, undulating walls, orange- and rust-coloured carpets with a swirling lava-lamp motif and banquettes in velour the colour of brown slacks. Those walls are hung with photographs of Hollywood stars — Sinatra, Mitchum, Minnelli — plus one of the late Queen with her corgis, outside a branch of William Hill. She did like a flutter.

I survey the room trying to spot a former schoolmate or perhaps a distant relative who was distant for a reason. I clock that I’m one of the few Jewish men here without a head covering. They’re the orthodox lot, who would doubtless look askance at some heretic like me who has no time for that annoyingly picky eater of a Jewish god.

This should not be misunderstood. I have an intense, dribbling love for a proper, chewy East End bagel (or beigel, if you prefer) filled with hot salt beef with its ribbon of amber fat. I adore chopped liver, and so much of the Mediterranean Sephardi tradition where the prohibition on mixing milk and meat dovetails neatly with an olive oil-based repertoire.

It gets tricky, however, when there’s an attempt to bend recalcitrant dishes to those unyielding laws; to argue, as here, that keeping kosher should not bar access to certain offerings, regardless of the standard recipe’s demands.

Hence a veal chop sits on the menu alongside a mushroom risotto which should contain copious butter and cheese but doesn’t, because of the whole meat-dairy thing. A carpaccio with rocket and enough truffle oil to make a snuffling Tuscan pig priapic apparently comes with shaved parmesan. Which again, it can’t.

To make a beef dish work, they have therefore sourced a vegan cheese, which is quite the leap. Beware. Vegan parmesan is the worst thing in the world, a stinking insult, with all the subtlety of a chemically seasoned Wotsit. It’s a cheese as imagined by someone who apparently has only ever read about cheese. It ruins what would otherwise be a solid dish.

The menu includes greatest hits from around town: a tuna tataki like they used to serve here when it was Chotto Matte, and miso-marinated black cod, the dish made famous by Nobu Matsuhisa back in the late 1980s. But it’s a mangled version. The black cod, or sablefish, should be marinated in a sweetened mix of miso and sake for three days, after which it caramelises beautifully and the pearly flakes crisp around the edges. Here, all the flavour comes from drenching with a gummy teriyaki sauce. The fish is limp and soft. But what would these customers know? They haven’t eaten at Nobu because it swims with forbidden lobster and crab. It also costs £54 at Tony Page which, impressively, is slightly more than Nobu London charges for the original. A captive audience will clearly pay what they are asked to pay and here, for what they are getting, they are paying a lot. The carpaccio is £32 and the chicken soup is £14. That sound you can hear? It’s my Great-Aunt Muriel’s eyes, rolling furiously from the beyond.

A £39 special of chicken schnitzel is unfortunately generous. It stretches away towards the horizon, a carpet of golden brown that merges with those velour furnishings. But it’s been left in the pan too long and is dry. Pity the poor chicken. Pity the poor diner. Give thanks then for the lemon meringue pie, which is a skilled piece of work: crisp pastry, a lemon filling with a proper zing, topped with piped peaks of toasted Italian meringue, curling shyly downwards. Mind you, my people have forever been striving industriously towards type 2 diabetes, and getting dessert wrong would be a calamity.

We mustn’t misunderstand. At Tony Page Marylebone, high prices and occasionally clumsy cookery are far less important than utility. His core clientele is here because it serves a need, and because there is comfort in each other, in community. They table-hop their hellos from one side of the room to another. Service is discreetly solicitous. Outside tonight it’s cold and dark, but in here there’s good chicken soup, great lemon meringue pie and, more importantly, each other. That’s enough.

Read Jay Rayner every weekend on FT Edit. Free for 30 days, then just £4.99 a month. Email Jay at [email protected]

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