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.

Notes Music & Coffee is home to the UK’s first La Marzocco Strada, the Maserati of espresso machines. Sartori bakes its Neapolitan-styled pizzas in the wood-fired brick forno crafted by Strazzullo Michele, the Stradivarius of pizza ovens.

With its Strada platform La Marzocco introduces pressure profiling, a technology which allows the barista to customise espresso extraction to draw out certain flavour components and mute others. Ordinarily a barista would pull an espresso under a steady brew pressure of 9 bars for 25-30 seconds. With the Strada baristas can adjust the pressure as easily as a chef would the intensity of a burner.

Initially I dismissed pressure profiling as a gimmick and the Strada’s mechanical pressure paddle as nothing more than a play toy for baristas. (Sure I too wanted one in my bedroom, but that’s another story.) Notes Music & Coffee co-owner Fabio Ferreira changed my thinking in 60 seconds. He pulled two espressos for me using the same coffee blend – Has Bean’s Kicker – but changed their pressure profiles. He brewed the first shot under a pressure of 9 bars for the first 15 seconds and then lowered the pressure to 3 bars for the final 15 seconds. He brewed the second shot at 3 bars for the first 15 seconds, ramped up the pressure to 9 bars for an additional 10 seconds and then back down to 5 bars for the final 5 seconds.

The difference between the two was dramatic: The first shot delivered the lemon zing that puts the kick in Kicker. The second was sweeter and softer, likely the result, according to Ferreira, of the long, low-pressure “pre-infusion”. If any geek needed a rationale to spring for a gleaming new Strada, this was it.

The appeal of a Strazzullo Michele pizza oven, like that of a La Marzocco, can be as much about machismo as macchina. That the company’s made-to-order pizza ovens are now mostly exported to deep-pocketed clients in Japan, Korea, China and the USA only enhances their snob appeal back home in Naples. Thrilled merely to have Strazzullo Michele take its money, Sartori did not dictate such design details as the shape of oven’s benchtop or the colours and patterns of its decorative mosaic. Strazzullo Michele pretty much told Sartori how their Leicester Square oven was going to be.

The shiny, bright-coloured ceramic shell you see encasing the domes of brick ovens at famous pizzerias is missing. So, for that matter, is the dome – or at least the top of it. The low height and flattened roof of this model’s baking chamber enables even heat distribution and cooking. There’s little risk of incinerating the crust even before the mozzarella has melted and the dough has cooked through. Paolo, Sartori’s accomplished Neapolitan pizzaiolo, can liquify the fior di latte that floats over his exceptionally light Margherita without having to lift it up from the hot stone and suspend the pizza in the oven’s hottest reaches. The hot zones are everywhere.

Impressive as they are, the Strazzullo Michele pizza oven and La Marzocco Strada espresso machine depend on top-quality ingredients as well as the skill of the mano del operatore. At Notes Music & Coffee and Sartori the “operator’s hand” belongs to geeks who know enough to know there is always more to know.

Notes Music & Coffee, 31 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4ER (map) – 020 7240 0424

Sartori, 15-18 Great Newport Street, London WC2H 7JE (map) – 020 7836 6308

Was The Ivy burger good enough to justify its £13.75 (about $21) price?

The Ivy burger was every bit as good as it looks in the photo: Nice shape and proportions, terrific bun (see the air pockets), the model of medium rare. The gentlest squeeze released deep reserves of juice. BP’s best engineers would not be able to seal its leaks.

But was it worth £13.75? Not at first bite. The Ivy burger was a middleweight with no premium accessories. Forget foie gras or truffles: this baby didn’t even come with cheese, bacon or chips (fries). Pale chips were £4 extra. For what you do and do not get this had to be the most expensive burger in London.

Or maybe not. Three-quarters into The Ivy burger I discovered the house secret: The waiter brought me a finger bowl. That’s right, a finger bowl. Without my requesting one. Without charging me extra for the fresh lemon, most likely organic, and the water expertly warmed to the ideal temperature. Bet you can’t name many burger joints that do that. Begins to make £13.75 seem like a bargain, doesn’t it?

Only later did I realise the waiter had not given a finger bowl to my companion, who had also had a burger. This could only have meant one of two things: Either the waiter had recognised me as the founding director of burgermonday meatups and thereafter afforded me the special treatment The Ivy only gives to A-list celebrities or I just had a lot more grease on my hands than my companion did.

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