I first met Andrew Krausz over WhatsApp during lockdown when the north Londoner’s smoked fish and meat was a box of delights among the avalanche of otherwise average home deliveries.
“We must meet in person when I’ve built my garden folly,” Krausz messaged, referring to the kosher supper club he was assembling in his Hendon home during the pandemic. Two years later, my phone pinged to say that the folly was finally finished — and would I like to come to dinner? My first thought was: how long does it take to stick up a marquee? And do I need to wear a yarmulke?
Both speculations were wildly off the mark. Krausz had spent four years converting the summer house at the bottom of his garden into The Fire Place. He calls it a monthly pop-up, but it is kitted out to far higher specs than many restaurants. As for the headwear? “Not all of our customers are Jewish or even kosher,” Krausz says. The USP, however, is that anyone following a kosher diet now has access to a tasting menu that is unique in Europe.
Krausz took inspiration from what he calls “higher-end” restaurants in New York and Israel — “but I’ve never been wowed by any kosher restaurant I’ve been to.” He charges diners £180 a head (plus £45 for matching wine) for a seven-course menu that he cooks single-handedly. The date of each Sunday-night dinner is announced on WhatsApp and Facebook and, within 60 seconds, all 23 places have usually sold out.
There are Jewish classics on the menu — chicken soup, chopped liver, gefilte fish — but lavished with an attention to detail that raises the humble into the haute. A lamb breast tortellini is submerged in the chicken consommé and the whole dish takes three days to make. The chopped liver is accompanied by port jelly and a glass of Wilding cider; Krausz visited the apple orchards in Somerset and then had the cider approved by the Beth Din, the court of the Chief Rabbi — “which is a first”. His take on gefilte fish is made with loin of hake rather than carp or pike, in tribute to the Sephardic Jews of Morocco; like the sea trout pastrami with pickled candied beetroot, the fish comes from a Scottish supplier for whom Hendon is the only stop en route to Billingsgate.
“There are two facets to what I’m doing,” Krausz explains. “I didn't want to get to the end of my days without having done this. People always said I had to choose between law and restaurants and I couldn’t do both. But I don’t believe in ‘no’ and ‘can’t do’. And the other is that kosher cuisine has the potential to be so much more. I want The Fire Place to be a beacon of the art of the possible. I strongly believe that when you bring all of the senses together, you elevate people.”
Kosher cuisine has the potential to be so much more. I want The Fire Place to be a beacon of the art of the possible
The price, certainly, is elevated; Krausz says that kosher ingredients cost twice as much as the non-kosher equivalent. And though each dinner makes a profit, even after the waitstaff of friends’ kids have been generously paid, it will take many years of monthly supper clubs for Krausz to recoup his original investment — though that, he says, isn’t his ambition. “I’m not doing this to make money. My ethos is that if I do something, then I want to exceed expectations. Otherwise I lose interest very quickly. That is probably the big difference — I’ve got to be careful what I say here — between some kosher restaurants and my outlook. Some of the others have been more focused on making a profit or getting away with doing the least to get the most. For me, I want to do the best and use the best.”
The perfectionism extends as much to what’s on the floors and walls as what’s on the plate. A spiral staircase leads down to a temperature-controlled wine cellar lined with Jerusalem limestone, where dinner might begin with a tasting of the house wines made for Krausz by Ya’acov Oryah in Israel or prestigious kosher vintages such as Château Smith Haute Lafite 2009. Most spirits are kosher, so there are premium Tears of Llorona tequilas and Springbank Society single malts. In total, the suburban cellar houses more than 3,000 bottles of wines and spirits.
Guests sit in a French oak-beamed dining room overlooking the garden while Krausz, in chef’s whites and yarmulke, busies himself in an open kitchen equipped with a Wolf oven and a Berkel meat slicer. An alcove in the staircase displays a silver box inscribed with signatures of Holocaust survivors while a painting of his Hungarian grandfather Moshe hangs at the top of the stairs.
The Fire Place launched to much local celebration last March; one year later and five months on from the terrorist attacks of October 7, the atmosphere among London’s Jews is very different.
“There has been a guilt surrounding indulging in any form — be it eating out or generally having a good time,” Krausz says. “We have faced cancellations from diners who just couldn’t face coming, particularly immediately after the attacks. I questioned myself and whether I could or should go ahead with our events. The conclusion I came to is that we offer an uplifting all-senses experience, which is intended to provide light in the face of darkness. If I were to cancel, it would have been to give in. And that’s just not me.”
Krausz discovered cooking while an undergraduate at St Andrews but says that coming from a traditional (but not kosher) London Jewish family, being a chef was never an option. Instead, he became a partner in a City law firm, specialising in aviation law, an interest that goes back to his teenage days as an RAF cadet and commemorated in the cockpit and tail of the Pitts Special biplane that takes up one side of the garden.
He and his wife bought their house 10 years ago with the idea of keeping chickens and growing herbs, Good Life-style, in part to supply the dinner parties they were hosting around their 22-seat dining table. “Entertaining,” Krausz says, “is very Jewish.”
He first began offering kosher smoked meat and fish from his garden shed in 2017; now Blue Smoke Meat, which claims to be “the UK’s first and only authentic certified mehadrin glatt kosher smokehouse”, feeds 300 customers a week. It has proved such as success that Krausz has sent his brisket, short ribs, lamb breast and gravadlax to superyachts, private jets and even a chartered Boeing 737.
Krausz became kosher at university, though growing up his parents took him to enough high-end restaurants of the Le Manoir ilk to know how Michelin-starred food should taste, and he misses eating it. “I’d love to go to Noma before it closes,” he says. “I eat vicariously by looking at pictures of that sort of cuisine. And I believe that by looking at it, I can understand it and know exactly how it should taste.”
The morning after the supper club, Krausz is back at his desk in the City, though he claims not to suffer from the Monday blues. “My feet hurt a little,” he admits, “but I’m good to go. Buzzing, usually.” But with 10-hour days the norm in aviation law, how does he find the motivation for a side hustle that takes up what little free time he has? “I'm a good multitasker,” he says, “but the day job takes priority. The Fire Place is a hobby gone rogue. But it’s contained.”
That containment extends to Krausz himself. He says that when he swaps his pinstripes for his chef’s whites he adopts a different persona. “It’s like putting my gameface on — I’m 100 per cent focused on cooking. My day job is enormously stressful. Fire Place is my outlet from that.”
Would he ever don the chef’s jacket full time? “Never say never. I don't think I could do much more here because obviously I have to observe the supper-club rules imposed by the local council. I was approached to open a restaurant on St John's Wood High Street, which I declined. Being a lawyer is my main source of income and I have a responsibility to my wife and kids. For the moment, this is the balance that's working.”
