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.

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.]

I was back at Langer’s two weeks ago and its hot pastrami is still far and away the best, though maybe not for all the reasons Ephron cited. Hand-slicing may be a big part of Langer’s lore, as seen in the paintings of the late Al Langer on the back wall, but I no longer see it as a secret to its sandwich’s greatness. Mine was assembled with the machine-cut slices you see above and it was outstanding. There were no meat crumbs or scraps to be seen – only thick, moist, extra fatty, deep-pink slices of perfect pastrami steamed to the point of near collapse. The rye bread is no longer from the fabled Fred’s (now it is from Bea’s Bakery), yet it too is as good as ever. The interior is wonderfully chewy and its crust is actually a crust: You don’t tug on it with your teeth, as you must with most other ryes. You crush it with your teeth. The Langer’s pastrami is in fact a double-crusted sandwich with a wonderful play of contrasting textures. Beneath the noisy rye, the impossibly tender meat is itself encrusted in its cracked pepper and spice rub.

So apart from the great rye bread and the superbly fatty cut of brisket (probably the point cut or “deckel”) I can’t explain what makes Langer’s the best. I can’t even defend my insistence on applying mustard. If pastrami has a more complex set of flavors than nearly any other food and Langer’s has better flavors than every other pastrami, why camouflage it with a condiment?