Restaurant review, Café Also, 1255 Finchley Road, Golders Green, London.

Restaurants and literature are such natural bedfellows, it's amazing nobody's done this before. Remember Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler? Or The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers? Remember the little Parisian cafés where Ernest Hemingway claimed (in A Moveable Feast) he used to write when living on next to nothing in 1920s Paris?

So loud huzzahs for the Café Also, a restaurant in a bookshop – not actually inside among the shelves, but a bread roll's throw away, through glass doors. The Café is connected to Joseph's Bookstore where for 20 years Michael Joseph, a Czech-born Jewish lawyer, has ploughed an independent furrow – offering Jewish-interest books, remaindered books, self-published books, paintings and DVDs (some in Yiddish). Howard Jacobson is a fan ("If I lived in north London I'd never be out of the place; I'd write there") and now so am I.

There's been a café of sorts in here for years, in fact, but only recently has Joseph properly integrated food and fiction, dishes and dust-jackets. He hasn't, thank heavens, tarted up the place, except for the double-frontage – a fantastic combination of half-frosted windows and pale-pistachio décor.

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