Was Bloom’s the best kosher restaurant in the world?

I also did a lot of background research to provide material to help turn the wonderful stories and anecdotes I was being told into a coherent narrative. It was a labour of love.

The book that emerged tells the history of Bloom’s from its humble beginnings in 1920, when it was founded by Morris and Rebecca Bloom at 58 Brick Lane, in the heart of the Jewish East End.

From the very beginning, it was a family-run enterprise. The family was the firm, and the firm was the family. Rebecca did the cooking for the small café and takeaway store and in the backyard factory, Morris prepared what became his signature veal Viennas and salt beef.

In 1939, Morris and Rebecca’s son Sidney joined the firm and gradually more family members and close friends became involved, enhancing the family feel that was pivotal in maintaining both staff and customer loyalty. The firm passed down through three generations of the Bloom family who were inculcated with the Jewish values that Morris and Rebecca had brought with them from eastern Europe, especially that of tzedakah. Bloom’s was always more than a place where Jews could eat and be satisfied. Initially, it acted as a bridge for recent immigrants between the “Old Country” and their new abode. Initially, Bloom’s customers were mainly single men in need of large portions of modestly priced food to sustain them as they worked almost intolerable hours, but also somewhere they felt comfortable to eat as they adjusted to different surroundings.

Rebecca Bloom with ex-Israeli PM Levi Eshkol[Missing Credit]Rebecca with Sidney and Sylvia[Missing Credit]

By the 1930s, Bloom’s café had moved upmarket (it was now designated as a restaurant rather than a café) and was again providing a bridge for Jews who had made it out of the semi-ghetto to live in the suburbs of north-west and north-east London, but who were regularly returning to the East End for business reasons or to stay in touch with friends and family still living there. It was also a haven for the second-generation immigrants who bore the brunt of Mosley’s antisemitism. Although they were not yet ready or able to leave the East End, dining in the restaurant helped to kindle their hopes that a better life lay ahead.

After the opening of the much grander restaurant in Whitechapel High Street in 1952, Jews flocked to eat there from all quarters. Commenting in the Jewish Chronicle, Ben Azai said: “The word only needs to go around that a place is full of Jews for them to descend upon it from every quarter.”

The restaurant was now acting as a welcoming reference point for Jews rapidly assimilating into British society. It was an intensely Jewish place, where people went to be with other Jews. The stories I was told provide a vivid portrayal of the iconic atmosphere that prevailed. It was crowded and noisy and certainly not the place for a romantic meal. People went to fress and talk, to see and be seen. The writer John Sandilands once commented that the noise in Bloom’s restaurant was so extreme that “you could stand up and sing an operatic aria without attracting much attention”. For a short while I considered calling my book Bedlam with Salt Beef on the Side!

The restaurant was also a hub for “nostalgia trips” for people who were aware that the East End they knew was fast disappearing. The décor of the restaurant was consciously designed to feed this nostalgia, including the photo-mural of Petticoat Lane market that adorned one entire wall of the restaurant.

The core of the restaurant’s customers were multi-generational families, who worked their way through several cholesterol-laden, highly calorific courses until they were fit to burst as they chatted about the Old East End. One interviewee who was taken there as a young child told me: “It felt like I was eating my family’s history”, one of the most important quotes in the book, which gave rise to its title Noshtalgia. In 1960, the slogan “The Most Famous Kosher Restaurant in Great Britain” was added to the external signage. A legend had been born and the restaurant was attracting prominent Jews from across the country, and later also from abroad.

The roll call of celebrity Jewish diners included Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, the Marx brothers, Ron Moody, Ronnie Scott, Donald Pleasence, Elkan Allan, Gerald Kaufman as well as locally raised Georgia Brown, Joe Loss and Lionel Bart.

Blooming' marvellous: a postcard of the iconic family-run restaurant and some of its famous diners[Missing Credit]

There were also many rich and famous non-Jewish diners: Princess Diana, Princess Margaret, Booby Moore, Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Cruise, John Cleese, Barbara Windsor, Dickie Henderson, Charlie Chaplin, Telly Savalas, Cliff Richard and Marc Bolan. Despite its notoriety, the Aldgate restaurant remained remarkably egalitarian, with peers of the realm rubbing shoulders with market traders.

Then there were the waiters. From the outset, they had been the stars of the show. Even before the war, they were described as “natural comics” and known for providing a “free floor show”. They finessed their act and became renowned for their rudeness and off-hand attitude towards diners, whatever their station in life. They were simultaneously loved and reviled. The writer Richard Elms summed them up thus:

“Bickering, grumbling, confronting, insulting, seemingly affronted by the very fact that you had chosen to eat there, it was like being served by a coterie of particularly stroppy cab drivers whom you’ve asked to take you to south London.”

A whole chapter is dedicated to the waiters, and it is crammed with stories and anecdotes. Here’s a taste: “When you showed up for your relaxing Sunday family lunch, you were immediately accosted by a bevy of waiters, vying for your attention and trying, quite forcibly, to direct you towards their tables. It was reminiscent of arriving at some developing world airport, where you were surrounded by dodgy taxi drivers and street hawkers fighting for your attention and custom.

“And things went downhill from there, with the waiters paying scant regard for the wishes of their customers or consideration of their feelings. I ordered a load of food for my lunch one day, but they forgot a dish. When I mentioned this to the waiter, he said: ‘You are fat enough. You don’t need any more to eat’.”

Over time, battle-hardened customers became accustomed to the waiters and often gave as good as they got. Another extract from Noshtalgia: “I once went to the restaurant with my family and wanted my children to share a Coca-Cola. The waiter brought one glass, so I asked for another.

“‘That’s not allowed,’ he said. So, I tipped out the napkin from a glass on the table and poured in some of the Coke. ‘You can’t do that!’ roared the waiter. ‘Too late’, I said.”

Perhaps the most famous and rudest of the waiters was Lou Dein, of whom many tales are told.

Legendary waiter Lou Dein[Missing Credit]

“My favourite story of the waiters’ hideous rudeness concerns a man who had ordered mashed potato with his chopped liver, but instead received boiled potatoes. Upon politely pointing this out to Lou, the famously ferocious waiter, Lou picked up the man’s fork from the table and proceeded to crush the spuds while shouting, ‘You want mashed potatoes, I’ll give you mashed potatoes.’”

By the time that Lou retired in the early 1990s, he was the last Jew to serve in the restaurant and the antics of the Jewish prototypes had been passed down to waiters from far-flung places, like a lesson from the Talmud, and given rise to a genre of Bloom’s waiter jokes.

The Bloom’s waiter served the gefilte fish with his finger resting on top of it. When the diner questioned him about this, he replied, ‘You want it to fall on the floor again?’

When it opened in 1965, the Golders Green branch was modelled on East End restaurant. Although it was popular for several decades, it never achieved the same celebrity status of the Aldgate restaurant and never had the same atmosphere or emotional significance. Even the behaviour of the waiters was not recreated with the same panache.

As Bloom’s restaurant was evolving, its manufacturing arm also underwent a major transformation in its role and customers. In 1931, Morris opened a “model electric sausage factory” in Wentworth Street, which enabled him to expand the range and scale of production to supply a network of kosher butchers and delis that had sprung up across London as Jews moved out of the East End.

However, the factory’s boom time did not arrive until the 1970s after production moved into large premises in Plaistow. Taking advantage of new canning and vacuum-packing technology, the factory began to distribute its products up and down the country, stocking the shelves of the supermarkets that were now proliferating.

The manufactured foods, many of which are still popular today, made a major contribution to sustaining Jewish life, even in small communities. One man who worked in Bloom’s factory for several decades provided fascinating insights into the workings of the factory:

“Even legends like Blooms do not last for ever. In 1991, the factory closed and Bloom’s famous dishes and meat products were manufactured under licence by a number of firms. In 1996, both the Aldgate restaurant and the manufacturing activities had to be sold to settle the debts that it emerged had been mounting for some time. The Golders Green restaurant remained in business for another 14 years. When it too went into terminal decline and was forced to close, there was great sadness but little surprise.”

The demise of Bloom’s, which was much more rapid than its rise to fame, was the result of a combination of factors, including the breakdown in the cohesiveness of the Bloom family, bad press relating to a series of run-ins with the kosher-licensing authorities, a failure to recognise emerging market forces – especially changes of tastes in food and eating patterns – and an apparent reluctance to modernise, both in the restaurants and the factory, at a time when it could have made a difference.

[Missing Credit]Bloom's Viennas are still produced and sold by Gilbert's Kosher Foods[Missing Credit]

However, perhaps the most significant reason for Bloom’s demise is that it was a victim of its own success. Having facilitated and supported the assimilation of Jews into mainstream British society, its role was no longer necessary. While it had been a once been a vital lifeline, for each successive generation, there was a diminishing interest in maintaining the connections to Jewish immigrant roots and the nostalgia that Bloom’s had encouraged had outlived its contribution.

Today, there are still regular cries of “Bring back Bloom’s!” and the large amount of attention the establishment continues to receive on social media is staggering.

The journalist Josh Glancy has encouraged British Jews to “imagine a new Bloom’s, featuring your grandma’s food reinvented in ways you hadn’t even imagined”. However, if Bloom’s were to be reinvented, it would not be the Bloom’s that became an icon, the Bloom’s that played such a significant role in Anglo-Jewish history, or the Bloom’s that has become part of Jewish folklore.

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​Noshtalgia: The Bloom’s Story, 1920-2010, by Pam Fox, is published by People and Places: pamfoxbooks.square.site

The author is in conversation with Alan Dein about her book at JW3 on October 30:  jw3.org.uk/whats-on/noshtalgia-blooms-story

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