Helen Graham and Marc Summers have produced a beautiful new bubala.
Not the flesh and blood sort (their partnership is purely professional) but a cute restaurant on Commercial Street — once the Jewish heartland and now a thriving hipster hive of restaurants, cafes and fashion outlets.
Many of us will identify with having relatives who inhabited that part of London, so it feels apt that the pair with a past in Middle Eastern food are serving up their Jewish and Modern Israeli-influenced vegetarian food in the East End.
“My grandmother lived near here” says Summers, who has worked in food for several years, starting out behind the stoves, but latterly moving to a front-of-house role — most recently as the manager of Josh Katz’s East London outpost, Berber & Q.
Both have Ashkenazi ancestry, and ate traditional Eastern European staples growing up. “My mum was professionally trained and an amazing cook. We’d always have wholesome home-cooked meals and generous portions. Mum made cholent a lot” shares Summers, who says he learned much about food from cooking with his mother. “I was always helping her in the kitchen.”
But they also had a lot of exposure to Israeli food. “I grew up eating shawarma and falafel in Golders Green” says Graham, while Summers recalls family holidays in Israel every summer.
“The name bubala, conjures up an idea of a family-style feast. Something made with love. No one every walked away from one of our pop ups feeling hungry” says Graham.
The pop ups she refers to were a series of events for which she and Summers first cooked together about a year ago, to test the water. Graham had already worked for several years as a chef, with a few Israeli-influenced restaurants on her CV, including one of the London’s earliest modern Israeli-influenced restaurants, The Palomar, and the first branch of The Good Egg in Stoke Newington.
Her other employers include the king of Israeli-influencers, Yotam Ottolenghi, himself, for whom she did a stint of recipe testing — “my sumac roasted strawberries and courgette and puffed freekeh made it into his book Simple”. She then spent a year at The Palomar’s baby brother, The Barbary and, more recently, a year cooking with UK chef, Allegra McEvedy.
“I learned a lot about flavour with Allegra” she says. Something that is highly evident in her food — which ranks as some of the tastiest I’ve eaten this year. Dishes like grapefruit ezme (a Turkish dip-like salad) exploded with flavour; and hummus with burnt butter was a revelation — who knew butter could do so much for the chickpea paste?
“I first tasted that when working in Sydney” says Summers, whose first kitchen job was in Australia for at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Sydney. “It was a great introduction to that style of food” he says.
They chose to keep their menu veggie for a number of reasons. “I’ve worked in some really meaty kitchens” says former JFS pupil, Graham. “I saw a certain amount of wastage there and so I wanted to focus on the vegetables and remove the protein factor from the equation.”
Summers feels it’s where things are heading generally. “Working front of house and taking orders, I could see a pattern. So many times, people would order vegetable dishes and no meat. It seems to be the direction we’re going in. In our pop ups, so many people were looking for dishes without meat. The majority of them weren’t vegetarian, but ‘conscious meat eaters’ who were aware of the choices they were making.”
The menu is heavily influenced by modern Israeli flavours. “This kind of food lends itself to vegetarian eating” says Graham, who says former Palomar chef, Tomer Amedi, has been a huge influence on both of them. “I love how he blends his heritage with Israeli food” she says. “He was really inspirational and the reason I went to work in Israel” adds Summers.
They have visited Israel together for menu inspiration. “We both love Port Sa’id [a fashionable eatery from one of Israel’s top chefs, Eyal Shani] — it’s just magic. I love the simplicity and how they take a vegetable and elevate it to something spectacular. Whenever I go to Tel Aviv I feel excited.” Graham has also travelled to Lebanon, Turkey and New York in search of inspiration for her menu — “I ate at a lot of Israeli restaurants in the US.”
The generosity of Jewish and Israeli food is important to them. “Jews hate small portions” laughs Graham. “My grandma would always have something ready for us to eat and would be humiliate if we didn’t tuck in.”
“If I went round to my grandma’s house she would always ask me if I was hungry and would feed me at any time of day” adds Summers.
They have already attracted some critical acclaim, and it’s definitely a vegetarian restaurant where you won’t miss the meat. Tiny shitake and oyster mushrooms on mini skewers, doused in soy, coriander seed and maple syrup add bite. Thick slices of fried aubergine, in a pool of date syrup topped with a spicy green zhoug (Yemeni hot, herby dressing) offer a similarly textural treat and are, Summers says, their signature dish.
Confit potato latkes are very different from those your bubbe would have served, but are guaranteed to make you smile. Thick, rectangular blocks of crisp, golden layers with Lebanese garlic sauce, toum, sprinkled with bright red flakes of Aleppo chilli.
Desserts are as simple and flavour-filled. Tahini, date and tangerine ice cream was like a creamy frozen halva; and coconut and cardamom sorbet equally refreshing.
The pair should definitely be proud of their new arrival.
More information here.
