I first saw Benjy Leibowitz, below, in action 13 years ago when he was calmly poring over the reservations book at the then The NoMad restaurant on Broadway in New York City as the phone rang and customers queued around him waiting to be seated.
Then last month I watched him again. This time it was about 9 pm and he was laying up a corner table in his new restaurant, One Club Row in Shoreditch, East London. A great deal has changed in the intervening years. Most obviously he no longer wears a suit, shirt and tie to work, but his love of and enthusiasm for hospitality remains every bit as strong.
The two locations are certainly very different. He had moved to New York aged 18 and worked at a lowly level for hospitality pro Jeff Tascarella at The Standard East Village hotel before moving to Chicago and university. There he lasted two months before, one Thursday evening, he phoned Tascarella to see whether there was a job for him back in New York. ‘Daniel Humm and Will Guidara [of the famous Eleven Madison Park] are just about to open NoMad. “There’s a job for you if you can get here by Monday”’, came the reply. He did so and his relaxed demeanour, his British accent and manners, coupled with a willingness to work hard and long, charmed New Yorkers and visitors alike.
Three and a half years ago, Leibowitz returned to his native city – he is a North London boy – and tried to replicate a business he’d started in New York that rewarded those who regularly made use of certain restaurants. This did not get off the ground, perhaps because New Yorkers and Londoners use restaurants differently. Then in late 2023 James Dye, co-owner of The Camberwell Arms and Frank’s Café in South London, called him. Would he be interested in looking at a 5,000-sq-ft site spread over five floors with a pub on the ground floor, a building that had once housed Trois Garçons, a restaurant with a colourful past?
‘From the moment we first saw the building, we liked the bones of its structure, but the challenge was to find a set of different but complementary identities for the various floors’, Leibowitz told me. ‘The ground floor was to be what it has been for the past 100 years: a boozer with good food, as its name The Knave of Clubs might imply. The restaurant on the first floor, now fortuitously named One Club Row after the street outside, was my homage to New York: customers dining at the bar; a pianist by the door; paper tablecloths; great food, wine and cocktails; and above all friendly and knowledgeable service. The top floor will open shortly as a series of private rooms.’
The principle behind creating different identities within the same building – of giving customers multiple options for returning and using the building – seems to have worked as Leibowitz reported customers happily returning to the first floor after the restaurant’s first month. And it does mean that anyone reviewing the restaurant has to take in the ground floor as well. Which is worth a visit just for the black-and-white photographs of its previous incarnation.
They adorn the walls and their discovery came as a complete surprise to Leibowitz and Dye. They were taken in the 1970s by Czech photographer Markéta Luskačová and captured the vanishing East End. Many show the caged birds that used to entertain the weavers who worked nearby. With your bill comes a postcard of the 1976 photograph below, with birds in their cages in the background. (The pub was known for many years as The Bird House because traders used to sell songbirds in the pub.)
The Knave of Clubs’ other visual claim to fame is a series of magnificent mirrors as well as a handsome bar.
In the far corner is today a modern kitchen which makes a specialty of rotisserie chicken and an artful toasted Cuban sandwich (ham, pork and Swiss cheese) as well as an indulgent chocolate mousse topped with cherries. Liebowitz is also trying to instil some New York hospitality on the ground floor: ‘Our welcome must begin at the pub’s front door and not when the customer reaches the bar’.
This and the much bigger kitchen on the first floor are under the leadership of Irishman Patrick Powell and his assistant Hungarian Attila Gellèn, who bring with them as much experience, from the Chiltern Firehouse and the Midland Dining Room in their case, as Leibowitz and Dye.
Their menu is an interesting mixture of the expected and the out-of-the-ordinary. Delicious Noir de Bigorre ham from pigs raised in the Pyrenees with celeriac remoulade; grilled asparagus with labneh; a tuna crudo with smoked aubergine; and a ribeye to share fall into the former category. Curried mussels with frites; lamb meatballs with harissa and chickpeas; and a cheeseburger au poivre with aïoli fell into the latter.
But I will above all recall the setting: the energy, the people-watching, the friendliness of the service, and especially the exuberance of the room. As Leibowitz commented, ‘There is no shortage of excellent restaurants in this neighbourhood where one can eat and drink well. There is Dishoom, Brat, Manteca, Bistro Freddie and soon Singburi will open. But what I hope One Club Row will be is a place where you can dress up a little to eat and drink well and have some fun.’
Leibowitz has now been in the restaurant business for 15 of his 35 years and in two of the most exciting cities in the world. I wondered how much his experience of both had stood him in good stead?
‘In many ways, it hasn’t’, he began his reply, somewhat enigmatically, ‘because these two cities are so different. In New York customers seem to go out to restaurants because of the venue and because of the social currency that exists because you have been lucky enough to reserve a table in the right spot. Customers in the UK are different. They are more conscious of price, for example, and I believe they are more interested in the food they are being served.
‘But it’s all part of a learning curve. Jeff Tascarella, who was my mentor, once said how lucky we are that every night we get to put on a dinner party for lots of people and we get paid for it. Work, if I can call it that, is a pleasure. Not all the time, you understand’, he added with a smile, ‘but most of the time.’
‘Yet it is all experience. And this profession isn’t so much a meritocracy as an “elbowgreaseocracy”, a profession where you have to put in the hours, the long days and the even longer nights and learn as you progress. But James and I have been in the business quite a long time now and we have absorbed a great deal of the things we believe our customers are looking for. It’s a profession that, like so many others, I fell into. But I’m very glad that I did.’
The Knave of Clubs 25 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6HT. Open seven days.
One Club Row 1 Club Row, London E1 6JX. Open dinner only, Tuesday–Saturday.
Main photo credit Justin De Souza.
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
