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.

photo by Brian Jones

Anyone who came here looking for a Cinderella story will be disappointed: The lead character in this Covent Garden tale is less an Eliza Doolittle than a Danny Didmuch. His fall from grace is revealed on a cold and rainy Thursday in December, when the former food critic of a major daily newspaper and the author of seven books is spotted peddling potato pancakes to posh patrons dashing to the Royal Opera House for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Tsarina’s Slippers. The London latke lad cannot get too worked up about the ballet shoes of a Russian princess when his immediate needs are Neoprine wellies and an Astro-Thermo underwear suit.

When news of Didmuch’s predicament reaches as far as the California coast the response is swift and sympathetic. The food editor of a major metropolitan daily sends him an urgent email:

Dude, if it’s come to that, you really need to write for us more often. We’ll keep you off the street.

The story should conclude with that happy Hollywood holiday ending, except that the frozen-toed Didmuch gets great satisfaction serving his crisp, golden, King Edward potato pancakes to the cosmopolitan throng passing through Covent Garden piazza. The chance to feed London lunchers as well visitors from some 15 countries brings out his inner Jewish mother. The Japanese tourists in particular are wild about his latkes. Several come back for seconds, knowingly spooning dabs of sour cream or applesauce atop their pancakes like the old hands they observe doing the same. He cannot bear the thought of disappointing anyone who might return from noon-8pm on Thursday 10th December or Friday 11th December – the first night of Hanukkah no less – and not find their beloved latkes. (Latkes are cooked in oil and customarily eaten at Hanukkah to commemorate the miracle of the oil, when one night’s worth of sacred oil burned for eight nights.)

For his penultimate and grande finale performances outside of and downwind from the Royal Opera House Didmuch (aka youngandfoodish, né Daniel Young) is to offer the option of a deluxe Covent Garden latke topped with sour cream and crowned with pearls of salmon roe. He may not care much about the Tsarina’s slippers, but he does fancy her daddy’s red caviar. He invites you to join him on Friday at 4pm for a Hanukkah candle-lighting and lots of latkes for all to eat.

Mmmm, Mmmm, wouldn’t it be loverly?