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.

Sure there were peasants who by circumstance or choice sought out the fattier bits of fatty meats. They regarded the streaks of marbling running through beef as thoroughfares of flavour and happiness. But it’s unlikely many striving for acceptance in genteel London managed to be as unabashed about their preference for the bad white stuff as Walter Matthau, who, as Oscar Madison in Neil Simon‘s The Odd Couple, tells the New York waitress: “Give me a corned beef on rye, all fat.”

Euphemism crept into the brine for salt beef when the British counterpart to New York Jewish corned beef moved up from London’s East End to to its West End. In the 1950s, if you stepped into one of the salt beef bars on Great Windmill Street and wanted a cutter like Bambos Georgiou to make you a sandwich with enough fat left on the meat to clog even your peripheral arteries you didn’t say so in quite those words. Likewise, the proper punters who followed Georgiou to the Brass Rail, the salt beef bar he helped open at Selfridges London flagship in 1966, used three polite, deceptively undemanding words to communicate their partiality for cuttings of the unlean variety.

And even now in the naughty post-Naughties, when trendy eaters are less inclined to have their meat trimmed of fat than their fat trimmed of meat, you mustn’t say as much to the cutters at B & K, the suburban salt beef bar Georgiou opened with Jerry Kosimar in 1967. If you do so at either the original location in Edgware or the newer Harrow outpost one of his sons, Michael or John, may correct your English, as he did mine.

“The next time you come in,” advised John Georgiou, “if you want it that way just ask for it ‘as it comes'”.

By this he meant fat-glistening slices of salt beef cut from a brisket with its fat side left largely intact. Untrimmed. As it comes.

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.]

After pausing to have a sandwich and take some photos I introduced myself to Genti and Andrea and told them how pleased I was to see them braving the elements. Though it was a mild autumn day I could already imagine them as characters in a Dickensian winter streetscape, warming their frostbitten fingers over steaming briskets. Andrea (at right in photo below) is from Florence, where the most popular sandwich meat is not salt beef but rather lampredotto (boiled cow’s stomach). Andrea wanted to know what I thought of his suggestion that they offer salsa verde, the Tuscan parsley sauce used for panino di lampredotto, as a condiment for salt beef. “Hmmm,” I smiled, recalling drippy tripe sandwiches at Florence’s Mercato di San Lorenzo. “No, with salt beef it has to be mustard.”

The first August disappointment occurred at the De Gustibus sandwich carvery at Borough Market. It’s true, I did draw attention to inconsistency while rating DG salt beef as the 5th best in London. But I’d also identified meat colour as a reliable indicator of quality: pink = good, grey = bad. On this summer Friday the warm briskets appeared to be deep pink to their very core yet the slices of salt beef were dry and chewy.

Even more disturbing was a recent rendering of the Nosh Bar‘s SB, which I’d rated best in London. On the 14th of August, the meat I had described as surrendering to the chew and melting in the mouth was tough. It was difficult to tear into it with my teeth without dislodging entire slices from the sandwich. I might dismiss this as an off day were it not for the troubling manner in which the meat was carved. Without bothering to steady the hunk of brisket with a fork, much less lift it out of its puddle of broth, the cutter gingerly worked his knife through the meat and held each slice aloft to let the broth drip back down into the tray. Also troubling, the crusty rye bread used in the past had been replaced by a squishy one.

I see no other alternative but to post a notice of cancellation from my top 5: If De Gustibus and Nosh Bar cannot bounce back from a rubbery August to a tender September they’ll be struck off the list.

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.