London food stores RIP
Grodzinski Swiss Cottage
Swiss Cottage – a name that promises so much and delivers so little. Swiss Cottage, the southern end of the stretch of the Finchley Road stretching from Finchley Road Station is now a motley collection of shops, an atmosphereless chalet-style pub and an ever-expanding Waitrose.
It was once a little piece of Jewish mittel-Europe where the needs of folk from Poland, Hungary and Romania would be met by meals at Cosmo’s, clothes at a selection of fusty dress shops and their meat at the nearby kosher butchers.
All of these have now closed as this population centred on the western side of the Finchley Road between Finchley Road Station and West Hampstead has largely passed away. Now the final vestige of this era is going. Grodzinski’s the bakers, at Northway Parade, is closing down after 60 years on the site.
Poppy seed rolls
Grodzinski was the byword for kosher bread products. Their poppy seed rolls were particularly fine and I was very partial to their Danish pastries. The shop itself was neat, if not particularly spectacular with its distinctive Judaic take on a sixties’ theme hoarding and with its tidy tiers of metal shelving. The family came from Vilnius in Lithuania, I discovered. Whilst they still have other shops in Edgware, Hendon, Golders Green and Stamford Hill these are areas where the clientele is made up of the Diaspora of religious Jews as against the secular Eastern and Central European Jews who were the mainstay of the Swiss Cottage shop.
