The ground floor of the 5-star Ned London, with its seven restaurants amid 92 verdite columns, repurposes a magnificent banking hall in the City of London. The Grade-I-listed former head office of the Midland Bank  was designed in 1924 by the great architect Sir Edmund ‘Ned’ Luytens for the clearing of transactions, not potato latkes. As a hotel lobby it is spectacularly sumptuous, but the scale of it is disorientating.

The Ned could stand to soak up some badly needed soul from Zobler’s restorative matzo ball soup. Or it could suck the soul out of it instead. Time will tell.

The Ned London grew out of a partnership between Andrew Zobler of New York’s Sydell Group and Nick Jones of the London-based Soho House & Co. Jones likes to bring over expert chefs on temporary visas to get his regional American restaurants off the ground in spectacular fashion, as he did with Pizza East and Electric Diner. To open Zobler’s he enlisted a legendary name or, more precisely, the heir to one: Zobler’s consulting chef is Isaac Gellis, the great great grandson of the Isaac Gellis, once the Lower East Side’s foremost purveyor of cured and kosher delicatessen meats. (Zobler’s is not a kosher restaurant.)

With his six-month visa nearly up, young Isaac’s future in London is uncertain and so too is Zobler’s enduring quality.

Go ahead, Nick Jones, prove me wrong. The potential for lasting greatness is there. Show me you have the will for it, too. Make Zobler’s even better, with or without Isaac Gellis.

Zobler’s #19 sandwich is a nod to Langer’s and that great LA deli’s Original #19 Sandwich – pastrami, coleslaw, Swiss cheese, Russian dressing on twice-baked rye. This homage is a beauty:

The toasted rye is packed with tender, high-impact, house-smoked pastrami, though the peppery kick is fierce, leaving a faintly bitter aftertaste. Less pepper and more fat on the meat would do wonders.

My dining companion, chef Jonny Rothfield, and I tried Zobler’s corned beef, the Jewish deli standard Londoners know as salt beef, on two sandwiches ordered a half-hour apart. The quality varied from cut to cut: The lean corned beef on The Purist, a no-nonsense sandwich dressed only with mustard (French’s, sadly, not deli mustard), was superb albeit a tad dry. The slices of corned beef on the wonderfully obscene Reuben, however, were marvellously moist and melty.

By asking just £3 for a bowl of matzo ball soup that actually has nice chunks of chicken in it and £8 for the powerhouse Purist, Zobler’s Deli offers incredible ROI – by which I mean the return on your investment, if not necessarily that of Ron Burkle, The Ned’s billionaire backer.

Go soon, before November 11^th 2017.

Note: E5 Bakehouse has suspended preparation of its bagels until a new, larger oven is up and running.  I’ll let you know when they’re back in production.

If you already found it next to hopeless to graze through all the must eats of London Fields on a single Saturday, from Banhmi11 Vietnamese baguettes at Broadway Market to Lucky Chip burgers and Home Slice Pizza at Netil Market, your life just got a lot more complicated: The not-to-be-missed bagels at e5 Bakehouse, Ben MacKinnon‘s exceptional bread bakery under the railway arches beside London Fields station, are only baked on Saturday afternoons. And good as those bagels are when carried home for toasting at the next day’s Sunday brunch, topped with a schmear of creamed cheese and draped with fat-glistening Scottish smoked salmon, they are at their pristine best when consumed plain and hot – not more than 5 minutes and 5 metres from the e5 Bakehouse’s ovens.

The name “e5” may come from the bakery’s Hackney postcode but I take it to mean “eat within five”.

No one would confuse the 60p e5 bagel, made with white flour and white sourdough starter, with a bloated New York bagel, the world’s most famous. Likewise, it has little in common with a honey-sweetened Montreal bagel, the world’s best. Even the traditional East London bagel or, if you prefer, beigel, is no closer than a distant cousin, the relative proximity (2k) between e5 Bakehouse and Brick Lane Beigel Bake notwithstanding. Lastly, brace yourself for a big shock: Ben MacKinnon is not Jewish.

But the e5 white sourdough bagel is hand-rolled, as all the best bagels are. It’s boiled before being baked, as authentic bagels must be. And it’s soft yet beautifully chewy, unlike the squishy and bready bagels you find at supermarkets. To eat a fresh one you must clamp down on it with your teeth and then tear it away from your mouth to break off a bite-sized piece. Eating a bagel is never effortless. If there’s no exertion there’s no bagel.

Is Ben’s bagel the definitive one? No. Is it flawless? Hardly. It could maybe be sweeter and crustier. A coat of sesame seeds or Malden salt flakes would be nice. A wood-fired oven, perhaps borrowed from neighbour Home Slice Pizza, wouldn’t hurt. Indeed, if you told Ben his bagels could be improved it’s likely he’d agree. They are works in progress: The ones I had yesterday – I bought 8 and devoured 3 on the spot – had a tougher and, in my mind, better bottom than the soft-bottomed versions from an earlier batch.

So should you maybe wait a few months until the bagels get better? No. Such a strategy is all hole and no bagel. Ben’s rings of goodness are already the only bagels of artisan quality I have tried in London since moving here in 2004, other than the pretzel bagels at Luca’s Bakery in East Dulwich. To my knowledge, amongst UK bakers only Pump Street Bakery, in Orford, Suffolk, has comparably high standards and aspirations for its bagels.

The great challenge for the Saturday grazer of London Fields is synchronising stops at e5 Bakehouse with the release of its organic, hand-made bagels. Yesterday I waited a half-hour for my bagels, an improvement over the 50 minutes I waited the week before. During those excruciatingly long 3000 seconds I thought to myself, if only there were an e5 Bakehouse bagel app linked to the oven timers sounding off when breads were nearly done. But then I imagined this Solomonic dilemma: Imagine standing near the front of the queue at Banhmi11, minutes from a pan-fried catfish sandwich, when the hot bagel alert from the app on your iPhone sent vibrations up and down your front pocket. The question is: Would you stay or would you go?

1. It costs £1.40. What chutzpah!
2. It’s not a bagel.

Prior to rolling out its lye-dyed rings of goodness Luca’s baked pre-boiled sourdough bagels. Real bagels. Unfortunately these were not a big hit in East Dulwich and were pulled from production. Much as I’d love for Andreas to bring back the sourdough bagels he could make me very happy merely by dropping the price of his pretzel bagel. £1.40 isn’t twisted. It’s meshuggah!

Luca’s Bakery, 145 Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, London, SE22 8HX (see map)

Likewise, discriminating young Londoners who, when within three Chardonnays of sober, wouldn’t be caught dead with a Tesco tomato in their organic jute carrier bags can be seen stuffing their reddened faces with questionable kebabs from an Upper Street shop that recycles its moulded and fully cooked meat, unrefrigerated and unprotected, for hours at a time.

At the risk of sounding like a drunken pensioner, things aren’t what they used to be, at least not for me.

In my younger & foodish days, when I got smashed with much greater frequency and far more dedication than I do now, I always tried to finish off a night of binge drinking by stuffing my face with trash food of the highest quality. As a student in Montreal I looked forward to being booted from my local, Taverne Henri Richard, so my drinking buddies and I could rush off to Schwartz’s for its incomparable smoked meat, Le Chalet for succulent rotisserie chicken, an all-night Polish social club for handmade potato pierogi, Arahova Souvlaki for juice-dripping gyro sandwiches or St-Viateur for sesame bagels fresh and hot from a wood-burning brick oven. From these experiences grew a straight C student – and eventually a professional food critic.

Back in my native New York we would hobble if necessary to Katz’s Deli for world-class pastrami, the Market Diner for a copious burger deluxe, Florent for steak frites, Junior’s for its famous cheesecake, Wo Hop for the greasiest subterranean chow fun noodles in Chinatown or, on one particular Saturday night bender, three of the aforementioned.

Living in Paris years later we would crawl on our knees to L’As du Falafel for its amazing spécial, Au Pied du Cochon for gelatinous pig’s trotters and golden onion soup gratinée or the last Vietnamese open in Belleville for a crusty banh mi.

In fairness to London’s late-night, liquored-up foragers, their city is lacking in 24-hour eateries worthy of their loyalty. If London imagines itself a – or even the – gastronomic capital it will have to improve in this category.

To this end I have a suggestion to underground, pop-up restaurateurs, existing as well as aspiring: Why don’t you serve high-quality impulse food in your flat on weekends from midnight to 4 am? Think of all the advantages: You wouldn’t be competing with licensed restaurants. You’d be performing a public service while enhancing London’s status as a great dining city. Were your soufflés to fall it’s unlikely that anyone would notice, much less give you grief. And given the likelihood that someone will purge the food you spent hours preparing you would not be expected to put out fancy linens.