Were you to meet Mishkin’s – and group – head chef Tom Oldroyd on the street your first thought would not be Jewish mother. Just read his response to my live tweet from a roomy booth at Mishkin’s last Thursday (I’m @youngandfoodish, he’s @tomolpo):

@youngandfoodish @tomolpo lunching @MishkinsWC2 with jewish friends from states. we are LOVING food.

@tomolpo @youngandfoodish So sorry I couldn’t be there. Please do give me your feedback, sounds like you’re enjoying it !

A stereotypical Jewish mother, real or surrogate, never apologises for not being there for you. It’s all your fault. Her tweet would go something like this:

@jewishmother @youngandfoodish of all the days to come in for lunch you pick the day i’m not there. that’s gratitude for you.

Not having ancestral ties to Jewish soul food may be a serious handicap for anyone trying to cook it. Or it can be seriously liberating. There’s no family tradition that dictates your matzoh balls be sinkers (dense and heavy) or floaters (soft and fluffy). You’re free to split the diff and make flinkers, as Mishkin’s has done, beautifully.

Likewise, if you’re not born on either side of the chopped liver wars you can do it smooth, chunky or smunky. (Just don’t call it a chicken liver parfait.) I really got into Mishkin’s smooth but thankfully not moussey chopped liver as well as its original garnish, schmaltzed (chicken-fat-lubricated) radish. Still, next time I will ask to borrow some fried onions from that superb, griddle-steamed mini-cheeseburger to accompany the chopped liver.

Salt Beef Bagel

Am I happy with everything? I do wish Mishkin’s prepared its own salt beef from scratch rather than source cured briskets from Hensens, as Selfridges Brass Rail and most other London salt beef bars do with varying results.  Even when the Hansens salt beef is not as stringy as it was last week at Mishkin’s (see photo above) its saltiness overpowers. The salt is in the brine to break down the tough brisket meat, not to block out every last trace of flavour. I have a similar problem with English mustard. Traditional or not I don’t see how wasabi nose is helpful to one’s appreciation of a deli sandwich.

Please, Mr Norman, give us some milder New York-style deli mustard as an alternative. If you do I’ll forgive you for not making Mishkin’s a certified kosher restaurant. I’ll give Oldroyd a pass for neither being nor having a Jewish mother. I’ll not say that small plates are laughable for a style of cooking with only two portion sizes, big and bigger. That leaves you with only the pork hot dogs on your conscience.

Latkes, Smoked Eel, Apple Sauce & Soured Cream

London hasn’t been too kind to its Jewish delis. Phil Rabin’s Nosh Bar? Closed. Bloom’s of Whitechapel? Closed. Blooms of Golders Green? Closed. The new Nosh Bar on Great Windmill Street? Opened and closed without a single newspaper review or mention. Gaby’s Deli? Threatened with eviction. Not a pretty record, is it?

Pastrami Reuben Sandwich

If you are an observant Jew who keeps kosher, or someone who believes eating Jewish means eating kosher, then you have an irreconcilable beef with Mishkin’s. I get that. But that means you also take issue with great Jewish delis like the Carnegie and Katz’s in New York, Langer’s in Los Angeles and Schwartz’s in Montreal which – guess what? – are not kosher either. Know also there is no such thing as a kosher reuben sandwich, the deli classic of corned beef, sauerkraut, Russian dressing and Swiss cheese layered on toasted rye, unless, as I understand it, you use kosher meat and kosher cheese and eat the cheese from a separate plate, six hours later.

My feeling is, if it takes an amusing, retro-styled invention like this to make matzoh balls a little trendy, or to get London’s food activists, gentile and non-observant Jew alike, to try cholent (Jewish Sabbath cassoulet) for the first time and get their foot in the Ashkenazic (Eastern-European Jewish) door then mazel tov to Norman. If some Mishkin’s diners go on to read or write about Jewish cooking, as many already have, or seek out kosher and kosher-style foods, or support new kosher businesses like Deli West One, tell me, what’s not kosher about that?

Mishkin’s, 25 Catherine Street, London WC2B 5JS (see map) – 020 7240 2078

Wrong question, I thought. If you spotted a beautiful pastrami lying on the London pavement in its brown paper wrapper, open but uneaten, you’d want to take a photo of it, too. I’ve heard of pastrami on rye, pastrami on club roll, pastrami on pumpernickel, pastrami on white, pastrami on a bagel. But pastrami on asphalt? This was exactly the sort of phenomenon the late visionary Steve Jobs had in mind when he fitted the iPhone 4s with a superior camera.

To me the better question would have been: how the heck did that sandwich get there? I can answer that, if you will permit me to back up 25 minutes to where this all started…

The sky in London town was grey and I was hungry. In other words, an autumn day pretty much like any other. Just before 1pm I arrived at The Deli West One, a new New York-styled kosher deli. I scanned the menu posted behind the sandwich counter and decided that a home-cured kosher salt beef sandwich would do nicely. (Salt beef is the British counterpart to New York corned beef). But just to be on the safe side I also ordered a quarter-pound beef hot dog with sauerkraut as a side course. As for the home-cured pastrami also on offer, that would have to wait for a return visit.

Sadly the salt beef sandwich (£8.50) I consumed on the premises was somewhat smallish, as you can see from the photo below. The meat, though nicely rimmed with fat, was a tad tough and dry and the rye was limp, with no oomph in the middle and little chew-and-tear in the crust. 

The hot dog (£5) was plump and meaty, with the right quotient of garlic and what tasted like paprika. Its casing, natural or not, might have been crunchier, allowing for a juicy snap with every bite, but that’s maybe expecting too much from a kosher frankfurter in Britain. I would gladly walk a London mile for the Deli West One hot dog, as I might, truth be told, for its slim salt beef sandwich. I would not, however, run a mile for either.

Upon exiting I caught a glimpse of a cracked-peppercorn-encrusted pastrami brisket under the carver’s knife. It looked good. It looked very good. I pulled out my camera.

– No you don’t, indicated the man behind the counter, wearing his baseball cap backwards and his New York accent forwards.
– But it’s for my blog, I protested.
– Sorry, if you need photos you can take them off our website www.thedelilondon.com

I’ll show him, I told myself. I stormed out of the deli in a huff, but not before ordering a takeaway pastrami sandwich (£8.50). Once on the street I found a wind-swept patch of pavement, laid out the sandwich and began snapping away.

This is how a beautiful home-cured, hand-carved pastrami sandwich ends up on the London sidewalk, under the foodtographer’s lens.

So how was the sandwich? Fabulous! More flavour per molecule of meat than any Jewish deli sandwich I’d ever tried in the UK. True, the thinly sliced pastrami could have been a little more tender and melty moist to the chew. The rye bread was squishy, as before. But the Deli West One pastrami lying on the Blandford Street at 1:20pm on 7 November 2011 Kingdom represented a whole new dimension in, well, street food. As I bent down towards the ground and devoured that sandwich the passing pedestrians asked themselves more questions:

– Would he walk a mile for that sandwich? No.
– Would he run a mile for it? No.
– He (that is to say, me) would hail a cab.

[Wondering why they didn’t want me to take photos of their sandwiches? I have a theory.]