Above all else, one should wish Tish good luck. Opening any new restaurant is a gamble, no matter how experienced a pedigree the people behind it may have. And since the days of the late, lamented Six-13 in Wigmore Street, London hasn’t had a single upmarket kosher restaurant.
But Six-13’s fate offers a warning. It was terrific. The food was superb, the service slick. It was as good as you’d hope, but probably not expect given the dire quality of so many kosher restaurants. And yet despite having zero real competition from other kosher restaurants — nothing else came close — it couldn’t survive.
That was for two main reasons. First, it had to pay not only West End rent but a premium on top of that — kashrut fees. That meant that it was at a huge disadvantage from the start with its real competition: other non-kosher fine dining restaurants. Because Six-13 showed that the market for such a restaurant within the Jewish community isn’t big enough.
We don’t yet know where Tish will be, or even what sort of food it will serve. But if it’s genuinely going to be top notch, it too will only work if non-Jews want to eat there.
