The Rise and rise of Jewish and Israeli food is hardly news. London is littered with eateries serving haimishe and sabra-style nosh. In many north west London parks, shakshuka is a menu fixture.
However, the most recent opening is worth writing about.
Firstly, Jago restaurant sits on Hanbury Street, slap bang in the middle of the East End Jewish and in spitting distance of Brick Lane. It is part of an easyJet orange, architect-designed space aimed at entrepreneurs and creatives.
Flavours and smells on the street outside are more Punjabi than Polish, and all along the road sit trendy East London boutiques, galleries and cafés rather than the kosher butchers and bakeries that once filled the area.
The second point to note about Jago is that head chef, Louis Solley, has chosen to model his menu on Ashkenazi dishes and not, as so many are now choosing - Sephardi food. It's full-circle for the cuisine that landed from the shtetl in the East End more than a hundred years ago.
"The area had such huge Jewish ties and I have a strong Jewish heritage," explains the 31-year-old chef - himself born and bred in Hackney.
Solley's father, Stephen, was a Queen's Counsel and his grandfather, Leslie, was a man of many talents - a politician, barrister and scientist as well as a musician. A generation earlier, Leslie Solley's parents - Louis's great-grandparents - came to England from Romania and Russia to escape the pogroms.
Although Louis Solley's mother isn't Jewish, his father's heritage played a huge influence on him as he grew up. "We came to Brick Lane weekly for beigels. I would choose pickled herring on onion platzels.
"Our Jewishness was all about the food, although we were taught to respect our Jewish heritage, and why we needed to learn about it. We were always aware that it was a fine line as to whether our family were here at all."
Solley has been cooking for 12 years. He trained at Westminster College, (alma mater of Jamie Oliver, Anthony Worrall Thompson and Ainsley Harriott), graduating in 2005 and then working at a number of London venues, including Richard Corrigan's Lindsay House and the Park Lane Hilton.
A trip to New York in 2010 was inspirational - "It's amazing, the thought that goes into the entire restaurant package, from the cocktails and on through the whole meal," - and he returned to teach at Ateliers des Chefs on Wigmore Street in central London.
Needing to get back into the kitchen, he took on a role in 2012, as head chef at the Notting Hill branch of Ottolenghi, a move that opened his eyes to a whole new way of cooking, and which could have sent him down the Sephardi route.
"I didn't know what to expect but as Yotam (Ottolenghi) and Sami (Tamimi) were very involved, I learned a huge amount about Mediteranean, Israeli and Palestinian cooking. There were lots of ingredients they used that I'd never heard of."
He left them last September to set up Jago with business partners Hugo Thurston - former general manager at Spanish-influenced restaurant, Moro, and entrepreneur, Vinny Burke. The restaurant takes its name from the colloquial title used in the 1860s for the area stretching from Shoreditch High Street to Spitalfields.
Solley's choice to pay tribute to his father's Eastern European food heritage had as much to do with the area, but was also because he felt the food worth revisiting.
"Everyone knows the Sephardi experience, and actually Ashkenazi has been downplayed. There is so much colour and flavour and it is so playful. There are bright purples from the beets and radishes and bright green dill and such bold flavours."
Some of those flavours have required attention for the English palate.
"We've had to work on our chrain to balance it so it's not too mouth-blowing, but some people do moan it should be a bit stronger," he laughs.
Despite its Ashkenazi connections, the (non-kosher) menu does bear some evidence of time spent with Ottolenghi. Breakfast dishes include grilled challah with labneh and house compote, feta and grilled spring onion frittata and fresh figs, goat's curd, honey and toasted coriander, which share menu space with salt beef and chrain beigels and the more trendy Hackney-fied black rice porridge, banana, kiwi, toasted coconut and mint.
Huge colourful lunchtime salads sitting on bowls on the counter fuel the resident office crowd, while the sit-down lunchtime menu includes pickled herring with beetroot, yoghurt and dill; mackerel fillet, blood orange, fennel and chilli and braised duck leg, spiced red cabbage and quince.
Solley says he plays on pickled, salted and cured dishes - all staple techniques of the Ashkenazi kitchen. "We pickle seasonally - at the moment we have pickled chicory, cucumbers and red onions in our kitchens. We also pickle our own herrings. I cold pickle them with white wine vinegar, fennel seeds, dill, tarragon and bay and leave them for a month."
While not exactly a faithful trip down haimishe memory lane, Solley's menu does pay tribute to a cuisine that shows itself as worthy of reinvention as its Sephardi counterpart.
