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.]

In a good sandwich the meat surrenders instantly to the chew, melting in the mouth and flooding it with flavour. There’s an easy test for tenderness: Pick up a single slice of salt beef, hold each end between thumb and forefinger and slowly pull the ends apart. If the meat stretches like rubber, that’s bad. If the meat breaks apart easily, that’s good.

When sourcing briskets that have already been cured, as most London salt beef bars do, meat texture comes down to cooking, conditioning and carving. First, the cured briskets should be patiently simmered for several hours. Second, the meat should be kept hot, wet and tender in a hot bath or steamer to within minutes of the time it is trimmed and carved – preferably hand-carved. Prolonged exposure to heat lamps will demoisturise the beef as surely as it would your skin.

It’s also important to have a crusty rye bread with enough density and chew to support the meat, an opinion not shared by the salt beef bars who seem to prefer thin slices from fluffy ryes better suited to afternoon tea. When you hold a sandwich you can feel the contours of the fillings through the flimsy bread. This is layer-upon-layer of sweaty brisket we’re talking about, not a single neat row of thinly sliced cucumber.

click here for map of top 5 salt beef sandwiches in London

5. Selfridges Brass Rail

The department store location is upmarket and so is the price: At £7.50 it’s the lone sandwich in the London top 5 that can’t be had for under a fiver. All the same, I love the fact that even after the recent move and refurnishing the Brass Rail salt beef bar has retaining its authenticity. It’s a London institution. Knowing regulars jockey for position on the queue, sitting back as an untested carver allocates the scrappier bits to others and pushing forward as an old hand cuts into pristine parts of a juicy new brisket. (Novelist Howard Jacobson wrote brilliantly about this moral minefield in this opinion piece for the Independent). That no two servings are exactly the same might be a greater source of anxiety were it not for another given: a Selfridges salt beef is never worse than extremely good. Now, if they would only upgrade the limp rye bread…
Selfridges Ground Floor, 400 Oxford Street, W1

4. Tongue & Brisket

24-26 Leather Lane, EC1N 7SU (map)

3. Salt Beef Bar

Not one for uncertainty, Chris Christopoulou named his son Chris and raised him to take his place at the salt beef bar called The Salt Beef Bar. The unambiguous name of this eatery in North West London did not, however, deter a man in a tracksuit from popping in and asking about vegetarian options. Chris Christopoulou the Younger must have figured he was about to outdo his father and become the first in his family to sell a mustard and gherkin sandwich. But the Adidas bloke walked out and Chris resumed what he does best: carefully trimming the briskets and carving the sort of pristinely pink slices of salt beef that make carnivores giddy. If only the rye bread were not so lacking in substance.
2 Monkville Parade, Finchley Road, NW11

2. B&K Salt Beef Bar

You don’t have to be Jewish to get the most out of this nonkosher deli, but it does help to know how to kibbitz. If John Georgiou, one of the Greek-Cypriot co-owners, is assembling your sandwich, be sure to stand close to the counter and tell him you think his brother Michael is more generous with the pristine house-cured salt beef. If Michael is wielding the carver’s knife and fork, advise him that John’s portions are a lot bigger. If you aren’t sure which brother is which, just make it known that nobody piles on the meat like Dina, John’s wife. Then, when one of the Georgious wraps up a sandwich too large to fit in anyone’s mouth whose name isn’t Lily Allen, ask for two extra slices of rye and have yourself two SBs for the price of one from one of the last salt beef bars left in London that brines its own briskets.
11 Lanson House, HA8

2. ZOBLER’S DELICATESSEN

1. MONTY’S DELI

227-229 Hoxton Street, N1 5LG,020 7729 5737

At its best, Nosh Bar’s succulent salt beef surrenders to the chew, melting in the mouth and flooding it with flavor. At its less than best, the meat can be tepid and a bit soggy. The rye bread, cut into desirably thick slices, is sufficiently crusty and chewy to accommodate the meat and mustard. Other salt beef bars tend to use limp rye bread through which you can feel the damp, fatty met in your hands.

Salt beef, known as pickled beef in the north of England, is a Jewish deli meat comparable to New York corned beef. The benefits of curing brisket, the cut used for salt beef, were originally twofold: First, the salt preserved the meat and killed bacteria, which greatly extended its storage life in the pre-refrigeration era. Second, the salt softened and broke down the tough brisket while letting its flavors slowly develop.

Most salt beef bars do not prepare their meat from scratch. Nosh Bar sources its cured briskets from Henson’s Famous Salt Beef in North London, which uses meat from grass-fed Irish steers and heifers. (If you live in the UK you can have Henson’s briskets, cooked or uncooked, delivered to your door). This hardly means that anyone who sources meat from Henson’s will achieve the same results as Nosh Bar. Cured salt beef requires hours of careful simmering to further tenderize the meat and sweat out its fatty juices. Furthermore, expert trimming and hand-slicing can make all the difference. Maintaining the quality of Nosh Bar’s salt beef ultimately depends less on sourcing than on diligence, theirs as well as ours. They need to baby their briskets and take care with every slice of every sandwich. And it is up to us to admonish them if and when they don’t. A salt beef bar is no place for British reserve. We’ve already lost the Nosh Bar once. Let’s not let it happen again.

The Nosh Bar – 39 Great Windmill Street, London; 020 7734 5638. Open M-Th, noon-midnight; F-Sa noon-2am. Closed Sundays. MAP

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.