Just before the pandemic hit I joined one of Rabbi Mendy Korer's public walking tours of London's ultra-Orthodox Jewish area Stamford Hill. The tour had all the access, insight, jokes and snacks you need for a gripping morning getting to know an enclave of our city that for most Londoners is an enigma. Mendy runs his public walking tour every couple of months and you can book via his website.
Friends and family were intrigued by my visit to Stamford Hill, maybe prompted by some recent popular dramas set in similar communities. So when the Covid clouds parted I asked Mendy to do a private tour of Stamford Hill for us. In the end we did three.
I wanted to top and tail the private tours with some local kosher food. Ideally somewhere that feels like it is part of the tour, and which made the tour feel a bit immersive by some mingling with Hasidic staff and customers, but where we didn't feel like we were gawping and pointing at a community that is very private and actively separates itself from the rest of us. This wish for privacy and separateness, what Wikipedia's article about Hasidic Judaism calls actively seeking "social exclusion", makes it awkward for the likes of me to go charging into local businesses that have zero interest in having me as a customer, let alone bringing a group of tourists.
Still, the venue for a pre-tour coffee and pastry was a no brainer: Grodzinski's at the top of Stamford Hill is London's oldest kosher bakery and makes a sensational cheese and cherry danish.
Lunch was trickier. I found a few suggestions through Google, but I soon realised that my exhausting liberal hipster algorithm required a reccy, a taste test, and a chat with the management about bringing in a tour group. Which is how I found Uri's Pizza, a no-frills kosher cafe on a side street off Stamford Hill, run by and for local Hasidim.
Uri's Pizza is run by the wonderfully kind, wry, brisk and busy Rivka and her team. She and Abraham were fine, if maybe a bit puzzled, with me wanting to bring a group of 12 on a Sunday afternoon.
Uri's and the nearby Tasti Pizza are the Stamford Hill's kosher fast food outlets. Their customer base is broadly the same as McDonald's: mothers and children, groups of teenagers, colleagues having a quick coffee, but in this part of town families means 5, 6 or more children, groups of teenagers are always single sex, and colleagues are more likely to be taking a break from their full-time Torah study not their office. Moreover Hasidic enclaves like Stamford Hill tend to have what Brooklyn tour guide Frieda Vizel calls a "mom-n-pop shop economy" and this extends to fast food, with no showing for the normal multinational corporations. At Uri's you do get a proper fast food style tray liner but it is bilingual Yiddish and English. As you can see in my photo, there is also a place by the door to park your fedora, the everyday hat of choice for Chasidic men and boys.
Falafel pittas are a popular takeaway lunch. It is manically overstuffed with so many pickles and salads that you need to fork it out of the bag. This is the "heimish" approach to food, and even to life, that is important in the Hasidic world and which you find all over Stamford Hill. The word heimish is derived from the Yiddish word for home, and in British English we might say "homely", although that word has been appropriated in American English to be a socially acceptable equivalent of "ugly". When it comes to food, it sort of means generous, maybe a little informal, and made on the premises. But it covers more than food, and writer and film-maker Sarah Rosen says heimish is "something you feel, not something you can define".
At one pre-tour coffee at Grodzinski's bakery I noticed they were selling their own sushi. I asked Rabbi Mendy how it is, and he answered with a complimentary shrug "It's heimish!". Decide for yourself. The ads for Grodzinski's sushi feature local "Hasidic comedian, magician, mentalist, mind reader, entertainer" Meilich Landau who cracks daily Yiddish and English jokes on his Instagram feed.
At Uri's Pizza the menu and food prep is based on the rules of ultra-Orthodox Jewish dietary laws. Foods, utensils and kitchens in kosher cooking are divided into meat, dairy ("milky") and "pareve" (neutral). Meat and dairy are always stored, cooked, eaten and sold separately. I haven't quite figured out how it works at Uri's, but I believe the food there mostly pareve, but some milky. They definitely have ice cream on the menu, although I have never ordered it. When some of my group wanted milk for their tea, it had to be fetched from the way in the back of the shop, but I might be over-thinking that.
Opening hours too are dictated by how the Hasidic week goes. While most days Uri's is open until 10:30 pm, like many businesses in Stamford Hill they are closed on Friday and most of Saturday. On Friday staff and customers are preparing for their own Shabbos including Friday night dinner, and they won't be leaving the house until after sunset on Saturday. Uri's reopens at 9:00 pm on Saturday for some late-night post-Shabbos action until 1:00 am.
As a popular hangout for large local families, during the day Uri's often has a log jam of double-buggies and kids' scooters and bikes both inside and outside. Beyond childhood, separation of the sexes is an important and visually striking aspect of this community, and this includes the counter at Uri's with its theoretically separate queues for men and women. This family I photographed here happened to fall into line, but at busy times the queue gets a little more informal. Or maybe heimish.
On the walking tours there can sometimes be up to 12 of us, so I always let Rifka and her team know in advance what we want for lunch. This means by Thursday latest, given the Friday and Saturday closure. My groups gravitate towards the hummus plate with falafels -- or chummus plate as Uri's menu has it. This may be because they enjoy that throat-clearing chh when ordering their hummus, or just because I pimp it quite heavily, but either way it's a good choice.
Hina, who snapped this photo of a hummus plate after our recent walking tour, says these were "the best falafels I have ever tasted". The hummus comes with a pool of either olive oil or tahini, plus some extra tahini on the side. Plus unlimited pita, although this is usually only theoretical because one is enough.
So what about the pizza? It's Uri's Pizza after all. Full disclosure: I have never had it. But one time when I was having lunch there, the guy at the counter asked if I or one of my tour group members had been recommending Uri's "on the internet" because people had been coming in for the pizza saying they read about it there. Most Hasidic Jews don't (or shouldn't) go online, although there is a small but interesting Hasidic presence on Instagram and a lot of folks seem to use Twitter. Uri's itself has only a super-basic and frustrating website, where emails bounce back as undelivered. So they figured it must have been one of their outsider customers who sent their pizza viral. I did some digging over lunch, and it turned out to be down to Insta-famous chef and self-described "pop-up kween" Whyte Rushen who had recently recommended the pizza at Uri's as "fucking banging".
The heimish principle of informality means that the menu at Uri's is not really a reflection of what you can order. Only items with a price are available. Even then, not always.
If you are lucky there are some off-menu treats. I once ordered a potato latke from the menu, but no luck. Instead they had some baked potato knishes. I rinsed three of them.
I had never seen knishes in London before. They are a cornerstone of New York Jewish cuisine in the Ashkenazi (European) Jewish tradition. I have been to New York a few times and I always go to the shabbily fabulous Yonah Schimmel's Knish on the Lower East Side. I was once there in the '90s when some college students were trying to make a documentary, and the proprietor was being hilariously grumpy and difficult with them. I doubt they got enough footage.
Uri's knishes, if you are lucky enough to be there when they make some, are very traditional. They are made entirely of mashed potato, maybe with a tiny bit of onion, baked with a few sesame seeds. Hard to explain how delicious and moreish they are.
Uri's has 155 Google reviews at the time of writing this blog in May 2022. Over the year or so that I have been going there, they have smartened the place up a bit with new booths and self-service hot drinks. They don't mind outsiders like me and my walking tour groups, but it is still the perfect place for a good heimish feed after a long day at the yeshivah.
Uri's Pizza, 4 Windus Road, London N16 6UP
020 8880 8788
Most photos are mine. Some are by friends who joined a walking tour with Rabbi Mendy Korer:
- Hina @the_ferral_goats
- Jess @jessicarimmington
- Ruby @rubysprecious
