“I don’t want to annoy people, but a schnitzel doesn’t need a fried egg and an anchovy on top to be delicious. You can leave it as it is.”
It’s a line that neatly summarises my conversation with Anna Tobias about her restaurant, Café Deco. In a city hooked on restaurant novelty – tuna ceremonies, cappuccino noodles, Michelin-starred chips – what Tobias hoped to achieve with her first solo venture is the opposite.
“There’s a great Elizabeth David essay called Letting Well Alone, about our inability to be satisfied with dishes as they are. The goal for Café Deco is to make food without all these unnecessary extras we’re tempted to add,” she says.
In the case of Café Deco, it’s not about producing institutional or austere food but embracing simplicity and tradition with open arms. “I really back classic, gentle food and place a high level of importance on the ingredients,” Tobias says. “You’ve got to build trust in your diners. In Europe, they’re much more comfortable with tradition – listing a dish plainly and leaving it at that, like borsch or dumplings. In the UK we’re self-conscious about our menus. I want people to come to Café Deco for a bowl of stew and trust that it will be good.”
With no hiding behind a jacket of hot honey or chilli crisp pangrattato, this kind of radical simplicity in the kitchen leaves you exposed. Tobias’ confidence in such unadorned cooking comes from training in some of London’s most exacting kitchens. First, under Jeremy Lee at the Blueprint Café in the cold starters and pastry section, instilling the importance of pudding as “more than an afterthought of panna cotta and tiramisu”. She then moved to The River Café, which she praises for fostering a positive sense of competitiveness among chefs, where young staff were diligently trained in filleting fish, butchering meat, and cooking vegetables with care.
It wasn’t until she stepped into a head chef role at Rochelle Canteen that Tobias really started to find her voice. “Margot gives her head chefs a huge amount of freedom,” she says. “It allowed me to write menus and find my own voice.” The experience also taught her something less technical. “Margot taught me how to feed people, host and be generous.”
Her path into professional kitchens wasn’t written in the stars. Tobias studied modern languages at Oxford University and assumed she would become a teacher. “By the end of my studies, I wasn’t totally sure what I wanted to do,” she says. Cooking, meanwhile, had begun to occupy more space. “I thought, why not see if this thing I love doing in my spare time could translate into work? I was young, and I had a degree to fall back on.” The transition took its toll on the body. “I’d gone from something entirely mental – reading and writing essays – to something much more physical,” she says. “I remember being so tired. Your body has to build resilience.”
After a residency at P. Franco, Tobias opened Café Deco in late 2020 – timing she describes as “incredibly awful.” Its first months were spent operating as a deli. “I actually hate sandwiches,” she laughs. “But we did make the best focaccia in London.”
The deli era of Café Deco revealed something else, beyond a reluctant respect for sandwiches. “People were so bereft of treats during the pandemic, they would travel surprisingly far to Café Deco for something small to eat,” she says. “It goes to show that food will always provide this unbridled comfort, fulfilment and joy.”
