Cure & Cut, Covent Garden

After noticing, once again, that the average length of the posts on this blog seems to be creeping up, I'm going to make a renewed effort to do a few single-dish or sandwich bar reviews. Takeaways and casual lunchtime spots are just as much a part of the fabric of London's food culture as any Michelin-starred tasting menu, and deserve just as much attention. Well, the good ones do, at least.

Unfortunately, though I was hoping that I'd be able to bring you news of a great new pastrami joint in Covent Garden, the reality of Cure & Cut on Monmouth Street didn't quite live up to expectations. But before I get to the details, a little lesson in How Not To Soft Launch Your Restaurant.

I first attempted lunch at Cure & Cut at midday on Friday last week, only to reach the front of the queue to discover a) They'd run out of pastrami and b) Even if they hadn't, the 50% off food offer they'd been advertising on Twitter applied to everything apart from the pastrami. Guys, I can get sweet potato salad and crispy kale anywhere; I've come to you for some nice salt beef. But then I suspect you knew that, didn't you.

Anyway, promotional cynicism aside, the product still wasn't that much to shout about. The beef didn't have much flavour, and was quite dry and chewy; it was impossible to take a bite out of the (faintly stale) rye bread without it drawing all the filling back out in one go, which is a Major Sandwich Annoyance. The Reuben was better, as the bland beef was masked by some nice melted cheese, mustard and zingy sauerkraut, and the toasted bread meant you didn't notice it was slightly stale, but it still managed to be fairly underwhelming, certainly not worth the queue. Tongue and Brisket on Leather Lane is probably my favourite in central (where I've never had to queue); and of course on Brick Lane you can get a beigel packed full of the good stuff, all soft and melty with fat, for £4. I'm comparing apples with oranges in terms of property rent, I know, but if all I can think about when eating a sandwich is how much better and cheaper I can get the same thing elsewhere, then someone's doing something wrong.

Oh, and the crispy kale? It was fine. But I'm sure you won't need telling you're better off getting it from Whole Foods, where you won't need to queue and they probably won't run out of anything just as you reach the counter. Right, that's enough of my whining. Onwards and upwards.

6/10

Not much chance of Cure & Cut making the app, but Covent Garden is a hotbed of alternatives.

Tongue & Brisket, Chancery Lane

One of the handier aspects of writing about a place with a short menu is that I don't have to feel guilty about passing judgment after only trying one or two dishes. Not that I often feel guilty about passing judgment on a place after only trying one or two dishes of course (it would be a pretty thin blog otherwise), but I just feel marginally more confident about the whole thing when those one or two dishes constitute 90% of the menu. Writing about, for example, burger bars or ramen joints is very straightforward - ramen good? Good restaurant. Ramen bad? Bad restaurant. Easy.

In an ideal world and with an unlimited budget, though, repeat visits would be made even if just to try the same item again for consistency. On my first trip to Tongue & Brisket, the salt beef was dry and dense, with odd lumps of gristle and a distinctly amateurish chewiness. The bread was good and I enjoyed the (albeit room temperature) fish balls but I was in no hurry to go back given there are 2 other salt beef places on Leather Lane alone after my custom.

But thanks to a couple of people telling me I must have been unlucky, I did go back, and on a second visit my salt beef on rye was pretty much perfect - moist, firm without being chewy, not too salty or too lean, a supreme example and for a very reasonable amount of money. Not Brick Lane Beigel Bake cheap, obviously, but not Brass Rail Selfridge's expensive either, a happy middle ground of £7.20 for plenty of the good stuff and some proper fresh rye bread. I'd have preferred they used French's instead of the strong English mustard but I'm probably on my own on this, at least in this part of town where a steady line of East End boys and black cab drivers queued up from midday for their hot sandwiches. I didn't see any of them ordering French's.

I went back one more time, just to make sure. This time, I went for tongue, which had the same clever way with the brining but a slightly less well-defined and mushier texture; not completely unpleasant but just not quite as bouncy as the salt beef. Still a great flavour though and good salt levels. The house pickles had, if anything, improved even more, nailing the sugar/salt/vinegar balance expertly and was a very generous portion for your £1.

Which just goes to show you that no matter how many times you tell yourself that it shouldn't ever really be possible to order badly in a good restaurant, and that 99% of the time one visit is all you really need, and all that most people make anyway before making up their own minds, a repeat visit can, on occasion, have its place. On my most recent visit to Tongue & Brisket, on a whim I tried their chicken noodle soup. It was absolutely beautiful, with a good, deep flavour of proper chicken stock made with real care and attention, a fine chicken consommé that wouldn't be out of place in any posh restaurant. And it had taken three visits to even realise they sold it. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.

8/10

Delancey & Co, Fitzrovia

With my usual route to work disrupted due to a large chunk of central London spontaneously bursting into flames a few weeks back, I've had to get used to a slightly longer commute in the morning. So instead of taking the bus up Kingsway, surely one of the least inspiring roads in Britain, passing on the left Eat, Costa, Subway, Wasabi, Pret, Café Rouge, Caffe Nero, Starbucks, another Subway, another Eat and finally emerging at Holborn station bus stop wanting to emigrate to anywhere that doesn't think cheese and mayonnaise is an acceptable sandwich filling and doesn't need my first name to sell me a bottle of orange juice, I instead take a stroll through Covent Garden.

Covent Garden, it's true, still has its fair share of dreadful tourist-bait grothouses, but dotted amongst them are gems such as the Opera Tavern, Mishkin's, 10 Cases and the ever-wonderful Kanada-Ya. There's also exciting new indoor food market Startisans, which during the week showcases a variety of interesting stalls and on Friday becomes a mini beer (and mead) festival hosting some of London's newest producers. The point is, look even slightly off the beaten track in London and you will invariably find something interesting going on - all any of us often need is a little push in the right direction, be that a block-wide underground electrical fire or even (ahem) a handy app.

So yesterday morning I was winding my way up Catherine Street and noticed a little place calling itself a "Smart Burger and Vodka House". It seems their claimed USP is to be able to match burgers with vodka, and indeed the short menu of all-bases-covered sandwiches (a normal burger, a fish burger, a chicken burger, a vegan burger) each comes with a short list of suggested vodkas. Lemon, saffron and horseradish to go with a cod burger, for example, or cranberry, lemon or mint flavours to go with the vegan. "What an interesting idea," I thought, "just what we've all been waiting for."

Actually, I didn't think that at all. Of course I didn't. No, what I actually thought was, "the very last thing that's going to make me feel happy about having to eat a grilled courgette and pumpkin purée 'burger' is the thought of having to wash it down with a shot of Toilet Duck-infused petrol." So, shaking my head at the seemingly endless ways dollar-eyed restaurateurs will conjure up to squeeze the last drops of bloody juice out of London's burger obsession, I walked away. And instead of a rant about Smart© (their copyright symbol, not mine) Burgers and tarragon vodka, I'm here to tell you about Delancey & Co.

Ironically, there isn't too much to say about Delancey & Co because it's really just a little sandwich shop on Goodge St selling salt beef, turkey and smoked salmon sandwiches in a couple of different breads with a couple of different toppings for not very much money. In New York it would hardly register as anything worth noticing at all, but here in London we've still not quite got past the stage of a New York-style deli being a wonderful novelty, and for that reason Delancey & Co deserves a lot more attention.

A salt beef sandwich on marbled rye was a doorstop-sized beauty, filled with an over-generous amount of meat and loosened with Swiss cheese. The most important ingredient here is clearly the beef, and it was of superb quality, with ribbons of translucent fat woven through the pink flesh and cut into satisfying thick slices. The cheese had been melted on with a blowtorch, a nice time-saving feature, and American mustard added an extra layer of authenticity. My only minor niggle was that the top slice of bread was slightly stale on one side; a shame as the attention to detail shown else where couldn't be faulted. Let's hope these are starting-months niggles.

Friends I was with had similar ingredients inside a Challah roll, which by all accounts was even more successful, firstly not being stale (which helped) but also having a lovely soft brioche-y sweetness which was even more evocatively Old Americana. House pickles were also fantastic, coming in home-cured 'Sweet'n'Sour' and 'Salty' variations a cut above what you might expect from most other sandwich shops in town.

OK so, it is "just" a sandwich shop and yes, salt beef in rye is hardly a concept unknown in the Western world. But people doing this kind of thing this well are still very few and far between - I could point to the Brass Rail in Selfridge's (good but expensive), the Beigel Bake on Brick Lane (good and cheap but on Brick Lane), Tongue & Brisket on Leather Lane (decent but inconsistent) but even doubling the number of purveyors of lovely fresh salt beef in rye bread would I'm sure still not meet demand. At least, it shouldn't do. Salt Beef sandwiches are a wonderful thing, and deserve to be obsessed over just as much as any burger. Having said that, if it ever gets to the stage someone opens a salt beef sandwich and vodka matching bar, I'm emigrating.

8/10

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Reubens, Baker Street

At a casual glance, Reubens appears to be a fairly standard café/delicatessen. There's a long glass counter displaying salads and soups, a fridge containing the usual array of canned drinks and fruit juices, and a basic if functional area towards the back where you take your meal on a little wooden tray after paying for it. It's the kind of sandwich shop scattered all over the City and West End to serve office workers and tourists - nothing remarkable, nothing wrong with that. But Reubens has a trick up its sleeve - it claims to be the only kosher restaurant in the West End, its specialities include home salted beef, house chicken soup and Lockshen pudding, and its clientele, judging by my visit yesterday lunchtime, are almost entirely sombrely-dressed Jewish men. For the first time not a very long time, I felt slightly out of place as I shambled in in my work jeans and hoodie, but fortunately I had kosher über-blogger Anthony Silverbrow to guide me through the ordering process and deflect the scorn of the belligerent staff - something else Reubens are justly famous for.


In true New York deli style, we began with a salt beef sandwich in rye bread. It was actually very good indeed. Anthony apologised for not asking for the fat to be left on, as this would have been even better, but even "lean" the meat was moist and tasty and the rye bread soft and fresh. It also came with two plates of superb pickles - a sweet and crunchy large sliced gherkin and a delicate lightly-pickled cucumber flavoured with I think bay leaf. All of it much better than it has any right to be, and accompanied by an artery-busting deep-fried potato latke with an addictive crispy crunch.



For dessert (what, you think a pound of salted beef and a deep-fried potato cake is enough for lunch?) we sampled the house specialty Lockshen pudding, a rather unusual creation made with noodles but which was nevertheless moist and sweet and delicious, flavoured with sultanas and cinnamon. A hot apple strudel was similarly satisfying, with a thick, moist pastry coating and containing a generous portion of spiced fruit.


It is a very pleasant surprise that after the best part of five years living in London there are still food cultures and traditions that go largely ignored by the rest of the city. Reubens is understandably popular with the Jewish diners of London but deserves to be on the list of anyone around these parts who want a tasty, hearty lunch for not much money. Of course, whether the diners of Reubens want their favourite local kosher joint to be inundated with curious Gentiles is another story.

7/10