Chef Anna Tobias on the brilliance of pure and simple food at Cafe Deco in Bloomsbury, London
Words Billie Brand
Photography Elliot Sheppard
Production Harry Cave
Anna learned from the best. Before opening Cafe Deco, a former greasy spoon of the same name, with the team behind 40 Maltby Street in 2020, she cut her teeth at some of London’s most celebrated restaurants: River Cafe, Rochelle Canteen, P. Franco. It’s not quite the path she envisioned when studying European languages at Oxford – although an affinity with the continent has inspired the plates here. We sit down with Anna to discuss finding the balance between pretty and ugly with her interiors and why, when it comes to food, simple is superior. Plus, she shares a recipe for chicken schnitzel and potato salad.
Anna: “Growing up, my family and I would spend our summers between northern France and Italy. My dad’s parents lived in Normandy, and they had an amazing fruit and vegetable garden. We were always picking raspberries and pulling up carrots. My granny – my mum’s mum – spent summers at her house in Italy, which had a tiny veg patch. I’d grow green beans with her there. Those early food memories are some of my strongest.
“At home, my mum would always cook dinner and we’d eat together as a family – my parents, my brother and me. She was a good home cook. Both of her parents are Serbian, so there was a bit of that influencing our food. I’m very lucky, though, because my parents enjoyed eating out too. We’d often drive across Europe to see our grandparents, and my mum would choose our overnight stops around nice restaurants to visit.
“How do I describe the food I make now? I often say it’s broadly European. I cook with Italian, eastern European, French and German influences. But all my food has a real simplicity about it. That doesn’t mean that the process isn’t complicated; I just don’t want to add things that are unnecessary.
“Sometimes people say that what I cook can be done at home. Yes, you probably could do make some of my dishes at home! But I’ve got to hope that I can do it better. My real focus is to buy incredible produce and cook with a lot of precision and care.
“That’s what I learned from my formative cooking years: to use really good ingredients. Jeremy Lee at Blueprint, Ruth Rogers at River Cafe and Margot Henderson at Rochelle Canteen all do their thing without experimentation. They are confident in the way they cook the ingredients they buy. I really bought into the idea of producing simple, delicious plates of food.
“Working at Rochelle allowed me to find my voice within food, because Margot was incredibly generous. They let their head chefs write the menus – obviously, within a framework that fitted the restaurant – and it gave me incredible freedom. Margot was always very honest, in a really good way. If there was something on my menu that she was uncertain of, she’d always come in, eat it and give her feedback.
“When it came to my own restaurant, I was fairly open-minded about where in London we should be, but there was a part of me that didn’t want to be in east London. A lot of my contemporaries are already there, doing a really good job. Many of us cook quite similar food, too. I wanted to feel like I was doing something slightly different.
“Initially, being in central London was hard. After the pandemic, neighbourhood restaurants did incredibly well and people weren’t looking to travel outside of their local area as much. But now, it’s all good. We’ve ended up with a nice location. The street is really pretty, with its independent retailers and restaurants.
“This place used to be a greasy spoon – and it was difficult to look past certain aspects of it. The floor was really horrible, for example. But it had the most incredible Italian bar, with a marble top and old-fashioned draws in teal and turquoise. It was huge! We tried to keep it, but it wasn’t very practical, which was a real shame. It was special, but we would have lost a lot of seating.
“We wanted the restaurant to feel a little bit European – like the food. We’ve put in the deli counter, which mimics the old bar. It’s actually quite an ugly piece of kit, but makes the space feel more relaxed. It’s good to have a bit of ugly in the pretty. I don’t want anything to look too perfect. I showed our designer, Michael Marriot, and our architect, Casswell Bank, references of things I like, such as old-fashioned Austrian wooden-clad restaurants with double tablecloths – a pink one on top with another colour underneath – for instance.
“The greasy spoon also had a mural on the wall in the dining area downstairs. It was really ugly, but I kind of loved it. I thought it might be nice to have our own, so our graphic designers, Anna Hodgson and Harry Darby, drew our take on it. I’ve always loved Jean Cocteau paintings – I’ve got lots of stamps that he made when the European Union was formed – so he was a huge influence stylistically. Anna designed a matching label for our house wine too.
“Since opening the restaurant, I cook at home far less than I used to, but I like to do it when I can. I really like hosting. I guess that’s why you might open a restaurant – because you like feeding and having people around. If I was cooking for guests at home, I’d probably make something like a roast chicken, stuffed cabbage leaves, or sausage and beans. Simple – like what I do here – but things that are a treat and a bit more hearty.
“If I’m cooking for myself, I often make pasta. I’ll always have pasta in my cupboard, alongside tinned tomatoes, anchovies, sardines or a good tin of tuna, lemons and rice. That’s it. The basics. I’ve started making a dish that involves frying some onions, boiling some sort of greens – leeks, broccoli, chard, or whatever I have at home – and then stirring it all together with a tin of sardines. Add some lemon juice and a boiled egg and serve it with rice. It’s delicious.
“The biggest advice I would give to a home cook is to buy good ingredients. It makes such a difference. And maybe don’t be too ambitious – make a delicious soup. Soup is the thing I make the most at home, and at the restaurant we always have a soup on the menu. You can make one from anything – onion and celery, for example. I feel like people should buy more celery. Buy good celery. That’s my tip.”
“A classic! The recipe is more traditionally made using veal or pork, but my mum always made it with chicken, so that’s what I tend to do at home and now also at the restaurant. I am a purist when it comes to schnitzel – no fried egg or anchovy for me, please. A wedge of lemon will do nicely.
“The potato salad for this recipe is Swabian. The Swabians, in south-west Germany, are famous for their potato salads and, for me, it beats the mayonnaise potato salad version every time. This recipe belongs to a German lady who lives on my granny’s street in Italy. Her biggest tip was that you must peel the potatoes while they are hot: “You must really burn your fingers!” Pain is clearly flavour in this instance.”
Serves 2
400g salad potatoes
125ml chicken or vegetable stock
1 banana shallot or 2 spring onions (white part only), finely chopped
40ml rapeseed oil or another neutral oil, plus extra for frying
1tbsp Dijon mustard
50ml white wine vinegar
1 pinch sugar
5 pinches salt
1 large chicken breast or 2 small ones
4tbsp flour
2 eggs
150g breadcrumbs
1 pinch sugar
1tsp chopped chives
1tsp chopped curly parsley
½ lemon
Start by making the potato salad, as it likes to sit for a while before being eaten. Cook your potatoes with the skin on in salted boiling water until soft enough that you can stick a knife in with ease. Drain. While the potatoes are still hot, peel them and cut into half-centimetre coins. Combine the stock, shallot, oil, mustard, vinegar, sugar and 3 pinches of salt in a pan and bring to a boil. Once boiling, pour all over your sliced potatoes and stir. Ideally, leave them to sit for at least one hour before serving. This can be made the day before.
For the schnitzel, remove the skin from the breast (if it has one) and cut thin slices along the length of the meat. From a large breast, you should aim for four slices (two to three from a small one). Cut off two 20cm lengths of cling film and lay them over each other so you have one strong piece. Take a slice of the breast, lay it on one half of the cling film, folding the film over the breast so it is enclosed. Using a meat tenderizer or rolling pin, bash the breast to flatten it. You want to aim for the width of two £1 coins stacked together. Too thin and it’ll just be dry once cooked, too thick and it won’t be elegant. Repeat with the rest of the chicken.
Assemble a production line. Put the flour on a plate with a pinch of salt. Whisk the eggs in a bowl. Have the breadcrumbs on another plate. Take your first slice of breast and dredge it in the flour; tap off any flour and dunk in the egg; next coat well in the breadcrumbs. Repeat with the remaining slices.
If you have a deep-fat fryer, set the temperature to 180 degree Celsius. If you are using a frying pan, fill it with 2cm of oil, heated until a breadcrumb thrown in fizzes enthusiastically. Place your schnitzel pieces in your fryer/pan and fry on each side until you have a wonderful dark golden colour. Drain on kitchen paper and sprinkle with the final pinch of salt. Mix your potato salad with the chives and parsley and serve alongside the schnitzel with a wedge of lemon.
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