If I can prevent just one of Brick Lane’s nocturnal foragers from yielding to the temptation of a Beigel Bake hot salt beef sandwich my move from New York to London will have proven a success. I appreciate that the Beigel Bake is a London institution, a revered relic of the Jewish East End and a valued 24/7 resource. But the thick slices of salt beef layered on its sandwiches are so rubbery and springy you would think the beef briskets were sourced from Michelin – its tyre/tire division, not its restaurant guides. Taking on that sandwich is an exercise in chew-aerobics, with precious little support from the sadly limp rye bread. The few molecules of moisture remaining in the congealed meat are instantly sponged by the bread. In this instance a beigel is better, preferably without the salt beef.
If you ignore conventional wisdom and instead let any of the top 5 salt beef sandwiches in London be your guide you’ll reach this conclusion: The Beigel Bake’s salt beef is not the way salt beef should be. The great advantage of salt-curing and maturing meat, as Claudia Roden writes in The Book of Jewish Food, is that it “imparts delicious taste and results in a particularly tender texture.” That’s not how it is with the pickled briskets drying out under the heat lamps in the window of the beloved Beigel Bake.
About Daniel Young
well, there are many other 24/7 food places in London. If this one was as cr***y as you make it, there would be no continuous queues and people coming form all over the city and even abroad to buy.
Are you sure you’re describing the same place as the one you photographed?
by the way, this comment comes from someone who hates eating beef, precisely for the reasons you mentioned above while supposedly talking about what you’d tried in the place..
Since when, Qamcha, are continuous queues an incontestable indicator of quality?
You go th the Beigel Bake for the cheesecake and Beigels. The salt beef and salmon are sometimes good but mostly average.
how can you say the salt beef is rubbery in there. shame on you the salt beef and beigals are the best ever decent and tasty. you have no taste quite simple really. you are an insult to food critics