For the nearly 45 years of its existence, Bloom’s restaurant in Whitechapel in the East End of London was a magnet for exuberant dining. Be it the Marx Brothers or Princess Margaret, Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand, the boast of the proprietor, Sidney Bloom, was that no one ever went away hungry.

The establishment was equally well known for its cast of manic and long-serving waiters, who often featured in the “Waiter, waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” — “Be quiet or they’ll all want one” type of joke. One of the best known (jokes, not waiters) was the story of the Chinese waiter congratulated by a diner on his excellent Yiddish. “Shush, he thinks he is learning English,” says the manager.

Quietly presiding over this theatre of dining was Sidney Bloom, a modest, shy, cautious man who, with his wife Evelyn, created Britain’s most famous kosher restaurant. Born in the East End, Bloom was educated at Raine’s Foundation School but left at 16 to join his parents’ salt beef business. Morris and Rebecca Bloom opened their shop in Brick Lane, then a centre of Jewish commercial life, in 1920.

Morris, a pre-First-World-War immigrant from Lithuania, had learnt the art of pickling meat in his home town. He got up at 3am to go to the kosher meat market that then flourished in Aldgate, brought his purchases home by wheelbarrow, and pickled beef until the restaurant opened. He later decided to try his hand at sausage-making. Because he used veal rather than beef, resulting in paler sausages than people were used to, he initially had to give them away to convince customers of their tastiness.

The little restaurant, or snack bar, flourished and Morris moved to a larger site in Brick Lane and opened a meat products factory in the next road, Wentworth Street. The restaurant moved into the factory, “over the sawdust”, when it was hit in the Blitz.

Bloom did munitions work during the war, then returned to helping his parents. He married in 1942.

The family owned premises in Whitechapel High Street that lay vacant in the postwar years. In 1952, after the death of his father the previous year, Bloom opened up the site and took the restaurant out of the meat factory. It was never without a queue at its takeaway counter for beef, chicken, sausages and salami. Devoted to his family, Bloom named the restaurant after his father, as M. Bloom (Kosher) and Son Ltd. Inside, he put his father’s photo on the wall, later to be joined by his mother’s.

The East End still had a large Jewish population, although it was beginning to move out. Sidney recognised the migration to northwest London with the opening of Bloom’s in Golders Green in 1965. City traders, stallholders, manufacturers from the shmatta, or rag trade, all enjoyed eating at Bloom’s. It was the perfect finish to a Sunday morning at Petticoat Lane market.

Visitors enjoying the chopped liver, lokshen (vermicelli) soup and cholent (24-hour slow-cooked stew) once included a Cup Final-winning team. When Golda Meir, Israel’s Prime Minister came in, the entire restaurant stood up.

Sidney and Evelyn made the perfect team. As the more extrovert she saw to customers as they came in. He, quieter and low-profile, though with a sharp sense of humour, steadied things on the kitchen side. He tried to dissuade his children from coming into the business, urging each of them to become “a lawyer or accountant”. But when he saw that they were determined, he insisted that they start at the bottom, washing dishes. He stepped down from active involvement in 1985 but always retained his interest and concern.

Whitechapel Bloom’s closed down in 1996 with heavy losses, and his rabbinical licence to provide kosher food, always retained, was pressed into service when his son ran foul of the rabbinical authorities. But the Bloom family, now into its fourth generation, continued to run a successful meat restaurant and attract celebrity diners.

Evelyn Bloom died in 1990. Sidney Bloom is survived by their daughter and son.

Sidney Bloom, restaurateur, was born on January 1, 1921. He died on June 1, 2003, aged 82.