Save the Deli

by David Sax

  But that was before John Georgiou held out what looked like a fried doughnut hole. “Allo there,” he said as I stepped into the B&K Salt Beef Bar some years later, “you must be David. C’mon then, ’ave a lovely bite.” I was greeted with the taste of mashed potato and sweet fish, kind of like gefilte fish married with fish and chips. John was the progeny of Bambos Georgiou, a Cypriot immigrant who had arrived in London in the 1950s and went on to become one of the most sought-after Deli Men in London, working in the Nosh Bar, Phil Rabin’s, Carol’s, The Stage, Ranch House, Leslie’s, and the Brass Rail. When his wife, Katarina, died in the mid-1960s, leaving Bambos with six teenagers, he bought a struggling delicatessen and turned it into the B (for Bambos) and K (for his late wife) Salt Beef Bar. Bambo’s sons John and Michael now ran the place. Though not Jewish, they were Deli Men through and through.

  “It’s real simple, yeah,” John told me, as we sat at one of the eight tables in the small wood-paneled room. “We stick to what we know and don’t try to be clever or greedy. You can actually taste the same food we’re all eatin,’ yeah? We look after the customers, don’t take the mickey, pure, wise, and that’s that.”

  John certainly didn’t take the mickey on B&K’s chopped ox liver, served as a dark brown scoop amid a mountain of loosely chopped egg and onion. It was stupendous. I had known chopped liver to have bits of egg mixed in, but left in a rough pile, the cool bits of egg mellowed out the powerful bite of the creamy, bitter liver, all sharpened by sliced shallots. When I headed over to the small counter to watch John hand-carve salt beef and steaming ox tongue, I nearly fell on my knees and swore allegiance to the Queen. John carefully drew his long knife against the grain of the brisket to produce sturdy, equally matched slices. As for the tongue, this was the first time I had seen a full one sliced by hand into thick ovals. Each time he pulled his knife back, it was like I was watching the sushi chefs at Nobu disassemble a side of Ahi tuna. None of the click-clack rapid-fire mess I’d encountered at Katz’s or at Schwartz’s. This was a master’s work. I asked John if anyone in London used a machine to cut salt beef. “Well they shouldn’t,” he replied, without looking up. “As my dad said, there are a very few carvers, quite a few cutters, and a lot of butchers. They know how to cut, but they don’t know how to carve the meat or handle a brisket.”

  John pickled his salt beef and ox tongues the same way his father did: in barrels with a low-salt cure, but without sugar or garlic, for two and a half weeks. Two and a half weeks! The longest curing I’d heard was half that, and only for pastrami or smoked meat. But John claimed that the slow, low-sodium cure imparted a gentler flavor than quicker pickling methods, to say nothing of commercially pumped products, which he detested. After pickling, the briskets and tongues were boiled in plain water, without additional spices. “If the beef is high enough quality, you don’t need to flavor the water,” John said. The secret was grass-reared Scotch beef, one of the finest breeds on earth, resulting in salt beef that was crumbly yet undeniably moist. It tasted like a steak with the aroma of the ocean’s waves. The tongue was even better. Hot pink in the center and more rosy on the edges, it melted away quickly, but left a subtle sugary aftertaste, as though millions of blades of sweet grass from the Highlands lingered on the taste buds.

  I’d come to London expecting poor substitutes for Jewish delicatessens. I’d been looking for the bland and pasty so stereotypical in British food. But here, in this small Greek-run deli on the edge of London, I saw that British delicatessen could be as good as, if not better than, its North American counterpart. Even the conversation was sufficiently Jewish, though wrapped in British gentility.

  “Oh, I’ll tell you, dear,” an older woman said to her mother at the table next to ours, “I’d much prefer to have a colonoscopy than an endoscopy any day.”

  Jewish Britain is a complex community made up of 300,000 individuals, two-thirds of whom live in London, which is equal in number to the Jewish population of Canada in a country twice as populous and a fraction of the physical size. It is one of the few European countries where Jews have lived the longest without anti-Semitic violence, yet British Jews still endure the subtle prejudices of the upper-class establishment and the kicks of working-class skinheads and Muslim immigrants.

  Jews first came to Britain with the Romans, though Ashkenazi Jews arrived from France with William the Conqueror in 1066. They lived in relative prosperity for a century until King Richard’s crusades unleashed anti-Jewish riots and all sixteen thousand Jews were expelled to the European mainland. Jews did not return to Britain until the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Inquisition drove thousands of Sephardic Jews out of Spain and Portugal. German Jews followed, though in smaller numbers, and the first Ashkenazi synagogue appeared in London in 1692. But like elsewhere, the great surge in Anglo-Jewry came in the 1880s with the arrival of refugees from the Russian Empire, who settled into London’s tightly packed East End, a dense, Dickensian neighborhood.

  Delicatessens began as butcher shops, but soon blossomed into small kosher takeaway places with a few stools. Salt beef and pickled ox tongue predominated, though pastrami wasn’t as popular, possibly due to the low numbers of Romanian Jews in London. Before World War II there were perhaps several dozen Jewish delicatessens in the East End, ranging from the small and simple, such as Kahn & Botsman, to the more ornate, like Barett’s, which served the court of Queen Victoria. The most famous East End Jewish deli was Bloom’s, which was opened in 1920 by Lithuanian immigrants Morris and Rebecca Bloom. It was by all accounts a loud, smoky, somewhat dirty place known for salt beef sandwiches, larger than life characters, and a reputation for the “rudest waiters in all of London.” The Bloom family opened a second restaurant in the northern suburb of Golder’s Green in the 1960s, and in 2007 they branched out in Edgeware, close to B&K Salt Beef Bar.

  The British government closed the doors for Jewish immigration in 1909 until after World War II. Life in the East End gradually began to change, as more residents moved to emerging Jewish neighborhoods in the West End. During the war, the East End was struck hard. Wedged between the military targets of the docks and the city’s financial hub, Nazi bombs and V2 rockets rained down on the tightly packed neighborhood, killing tens of thousands and destroying synagogues, shops, and delicatessens in the area. After the war, few Jewish residents returned.

  Today, the East End is a mixed working-class and artistic neighborhood, inhabited mostly by Bangladeshi and other South Asian Muslim immigrants. There are no more Jewish delicatessens. The Whitechapel Bloom’s closed in 1996 amid a scandal over health inspections and the loss of kosher certification. The only taste of Jewish food in the East End can be found at the far end of Brick Lane, in the beigel shops.

  The Brits spell bagel as beigel, which I’ve been told is actually more faithful to the original Yiddish pronunciation. But the beigels are nevertheless the real deal: rolled, boiled, baked, and rather dense. At night, crowds of hungry hipsters pack into the blindingly lit Brick Lane Beigel Bake, where tough-talking counterwomen dish up overstuffed beigels with hot, juicy salt beef, spicy Coleman’s English mustard, and garlicky pickles for just £2.60, with a generous helping of Cockney wit.

  I asked Jo, the woman in charge, if they made their own salt beef.

  “Oh yeah!” she said, barrel-rolling her eyes like F-16s. “We raise ’em, we kill ’em, we slaughter ’em, and we cook ’em!”

  Brick Lane Beigel Bake is actually only three decades old. There are no tables and the kosher salami is served with butter, but from the perspective of eating salt beef in the East End, this is as close as it gets. The steaming meat is hand-cut thick and heaped onto soft beigels. It’s tender and not overly salty, with a strong, rare roast beef taste to it.

  Jewish delicatessen has remained a limited ethnic specialty in the U.K. “Delicatessen here just simply isn’t the same as it is in New York, where many of the classics [of Jewish deli] are firmly in the mainstream, and not just for the Jews,” remarked
Jay Rayner, the food critic for the Observer newspaper. We were sitting among the lunchtime masses at The Brass Rail, a “salt beef bar” in the sumptuous food hall of Selfridges and Co., the luxury Oxford Street department store. With plates of juicy salt beef and splendid, fatty tongue stuffed in our cheeks, we ate surrounded by Britain’s upper crust. “America is an immigrant culture in all regards and everything permeates this culture,” said Rayner. “Although we [British] are supposed to be officially multicultural, it’s still a white, Protestant, homogenous culture. If there is an interest in salt beef, it’s because of reverse Americana, without regard to its Jewish roots.”

  In London’s Jewish delis today, you will find more references to New York’s Lower East Side than you will to the East End of London. The Web site of The Brass Rail proudly proclaims, “There’s something so New York about a salt beef sandwich, and something equally reminiscent of the Big Apple about The Brass Rail.” I found this funny, because The Brass Rail, with its white toque-topped chefs and settings fit for royalty, would never, ever fly in Manhattan. Imagine the Carnegie setting up shop inside Saks Fifth Avenue, and you get an inkling of how characteristically New York that would be. No one calls salt beef “East End style.” It is implied that the food is Jewish, but any explicit connection in writing to Jewish tradition is generally missing. This is a direct contrast to New York, where playing up the nostalgic aspect of a Jewish deli is common. In London, nostalgia may exist, but it is hidden, like much of Yiddish culture.

  When Jewish immigrants began arriving in large numbers in the 1880s, East End schools became a battleground between Yiddish greenhorns and the Anglo-Jewish establishment. Wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds insisted that institutions they funded, such as the Jews Free School, served to anglicize immigrants as quickly and fully as possible. Having themselves worked to break into the heights of British society, they loathed the idea of uneducated, “foreign” Jews ruining it for everyone. Students at the school were made to dress like proper Englishmen and engaged in gentlemanly sports such as cricket and rowing. On school grounds, they were forbidden to speak Yiddish and were instructed to “avoid the thickness of voice and nasal twang at all times.” This wasn’t the voluntary country club assimilation of 1950s suburban America. This was a directed effort by the established Jewish community to make Eastern European Jews as British as possible, to “humanize them” and eradicate any flavor of the shtetl.

  The ramifications of this are still being felt to this day. Jonathan Freedland, a London-based journalist and author who is actively involved in the Jewish community, compared the divergent Jewish experiences in the United Kingdom and United States to that of the gay community. In the United States, he said, Jews were “out,” their Jewish identity proudly displayed. “Here, we’re very much still in the closet. I’ll even give you an example. I’ve been in Jewish delicatessens where two people are talking and one will say, ‘Oh, Gwyneth Paltrow? I didn’t know she was [Freedland mouthed the word ‘Jewish’].’ We can’t even say it out loud in a Jewish restaurant. What does that tell you?”

  While working-class roots are a source of pride in the United States, the rigors of a monarchy-based upper class in Britain place a greater emphasis on one’s lineage. While the Hollywood studio executive can rhapsodize about his childhood in a Brooklyn tenement, the same cannot be said of the peer from the House of Commons who grew up on Brick Lane. This affected how London’s Jewish delis evolved.

  “Possibly because of the intense pressures of assimilation from within the Jewish community itself, you would only have found Yiddish culture inside the house,” remarked Claudia Roden, a celebrated cookbook author and food anthropologist who lives in the heavily Jewish suburb, Golder’s Green. Anglicization was pushed on the diet of Eastern European immigrants from the beginning. “Class mattered very much,” Roden told me. “The first Jewish cookbook here was anonymously written by Lady Judith Montefiore, and it had all grand upper-class French and Victorian dishes, though it was kosher.” This, and a later book called The Economical Jewish Cook, featured hardly any dishes considered traditionally Jewish. Perhaps because of this, Roden surmised, delis in Britain never became the great social gathering space that they were in the United States.

  But the flipside of this is interesting. While delis in the United States and Canada are now serving mostly gentile clientele, those in London remain solidly Jewish. Many have a customer base that is 95 per cent Jewish, an almost unthinkable number in North America. Having stayed close to the taste buds of the Jewish community, the salt beef, matzo ball soup, and other traditional delicacies retain a faithful flavor. Very little of it is packaged or processed, and most of the dozen or so Jewish delis operating in the United Kingdom are either glatt kosher, kosher, or kosher style. When I say kosher style, I don’t mean in the California sense of the word (Hebrew National hot dogs and Jimmy Dean pork sausages). I mean no milk with meat and no shellfish or pig on the menu at all. For those who love a greasy, cheesy Reuben sandwich, this may be a detriment, but for a delicatessen purist such as myself, this is always a welcome sign of respect. Most London delis cure their salt beef and ox tongues in barrels of salt and spices, without artificial preservatives, and every London deli cuts its meat by hand.

  My one criticism of London Jewish deli lies with the rye bread, which is the worst on earth. It’s basically white bread with caraway seeds. I don’t think a grain of rye flour has ever neared it. I pray for the day when some bakery maven from London takes a course at Zingerman’s Bakehouse. Thankfully, the fighting lion of hot English mustard offsets the disastrous rye. It packs a serious wallop, which initially overwhelmed me, because I tend to douse my sandwiches with mustard. I often had to stop eating for two full minutes because it felt like I’d just inhaled a clump of wasabi.

  London’s deli menus are basic. Sandwiches are either hot salt beef, hot ox tongue, kosher salami, or chopped liver. There is a requisite chicken soup with matzo balls (referred to as the Yiddish kneidlach), kreplach, or lokshen (noodles). Gefilte fish is prominent and popular, especially the hot, fried variety. Each deli serves latkes, and all pride themselves on the quality of their lokshen pudding. Overall, the portions are good, about five to six ounces of meat per sandwich, though everything comes à la carte, which gets pricey. A salt beef sandwich alone can cost the equivalent of twenty dollars.

  London’s delis tend to be rather upscale, with cloth napkins, heavy silverware, and modern decor. While deli customers in North America want their delis down, dirty, and cheap, London’s delis have adapted to the city’s refined opulence. Only in London could you have The Brass Rail directly across from a counter selling white truffles at £1,000 a pound. Up the street from Selfridges is Reuben’s, a kosher deli in surroundings rich with black marble and halogen lighting. Walking the restaurant with Tam Hassan, a tall, thick young man in his early twenties whose father, Az, owns Reuben’s, I soon learned how the trappings of opulence have actually benefited the taste of the deli here.

  The chopped liver sold at Reuben’s comes plain, on china embossed with the restaurant’s name, but it is nevertheless indicative of Tam’s skills (he studied at the Cordon Bleu). There are actually two chopped livers. The “Paté” is a sweet ball of chopped chicken liver, loaded with caramelized onions, and served with beet-sweetened horseradish, known as chrain. It glides down the throat, cool and creamy, with a subtle candied aftertaste. Its cousin is the chopped liver of veal, served with a grating of chopped egg. The flavor of the veal’s liver is stronger than chicken, though milder than that of ox or beef liver, and is also eased down by a generous dollop of schmaltz in the glistening mix. Once I tasted the chicken soup I could see why schmaltz was so liberally used at Reuben’s. The shallow bowl glowed like the jewelry of the Saudi princesses who shopped at Harrods. The matzo balls were golden down to the core. Liquid decadence.

  No one has married Jewish London’s food traditions with the trappings of class more than caterers Kenneth and Susan Arfin. Their high-e
nd kosher restaurant, Bevis Marks, is connected to Britain’s oldest synagogue, in London’s East End. Arfin’s family were originally butchers in nearby Petticoat Lane, and though the menu is fusion-heavy, there are contemporary nods to deli roots. At Bevis Marks you’ll find matzo ball soup, as well as chopped liver with spiced fig compote. There’s a traditional salt beef with horseradish relish, but they also do a Thai salt beef, fried in green chili sauce. “We mustn’t forget our traditions,” Kenneth Arfin said to me; he was dressed in an impeccable three-piece pinstripe suit. “Once we lose our traditional foods we inevitably lose other things. And then what actually are we?” he asked. “Jews by name perhaps?”

  Stately delis don’t necessarily translate into civilized clients. At Harry Morgan’s, London’s best-known Jewish delicatessen in the posh St. John’s Wood area, owner Mitchell Tillman recounted with amazement how he walked back to the kitchen one crowded Saturday, heard the usual argument for an empty table, and emerged minutes later to see chairs, food, and bloody fists soaring through the air. Most of the time, Tillman just fields the standard complaints from his loyal customers, however ridiculous, like when a diner said his lokshen pudding was served upside down (there is no right side up). Young, tall, and elegantly dressed in a wool suit with cufflinks, Tillman hardly presented the image of a Deli Man. But he is an energetic and dedicated owner who hopes to take Jewish delicatessen out of obscurity in Britain.