AS IT is written in the scriptures, Voos vaist a
chazar fn lokshen. Which roughly translated from Yiddish means 'Don't ask the London Tourist Board where to go for Jewish food: they'll send you to Blooms.' This may explain why some gentile Lon- doners believe chopped liver to he a brown version of Polyfilla, chicken soup to be a lightly seasoned form of bath water and a latke a type of thermal insulation for the inside of your shoe.
Not that everything will be made better just by avoiding Blooms. There are as many different types of Jewish cooking as there are divisions of the diaspora, but traditionally London only ever had the standard Mitteleuropean version. True, there have always been a few rather dingy falafel houses in the north-west hinter- lands, but for the main part Jewish food has been taken from the salt beef and chicken soup cook-books. At its most unambitious this.has meant places like the Soho salt beef bars (of which Phil Rabin's was considered the best by the salt beef
mavens) and at its most acceptable this was, and still is, the Nosherie, which caters for Hatton Garden's diamond-trading set.
The Nosherie is really no more than an overblown snack bar, but it manages to get it right on most counts. The food hardly constitutes a cuisine but it is freshly pre- pared. The decor, in muted shades of teakette and melamine, is purest G-Plan milk bar but is comfortable in a homely sort of way. And the staff — a collection of great-auntie Sadies straight from central casting — are just right. Furthermore, the cheese blintzes are the best in Christen- dom.
One branch of Jewish cooking which London has never really had until recently is that which is eaten by Jews and gentiles alike in New York without any thought as to its provenance. Indeed such has been the integration that it's only when they are brought over here that they become crypto-Jewish.
Widow Applebaum's in South Molton Street tried to import the style a decade `He's not so grim after a few beers.' ago but their version was, and is, so anodyne that it's hardly a real representa- tion of the genre. Mitchell & O'Brien, on the other hand, gives a fairly good impress- ion of a Manhattan deli, the sort of place which serves up borscht with pirogi and Moishe's cheesecake, despite being own- ed by a couple who I can only presume to be Irish.
Where it differs from the American model is in its wildly erratic standards. Despite this, the chopped liver remains a constant — perfect and coarsely rubbed, as it should be, with enough onion and crumbled hard-boiled egg. The chicken soup is in essence OK, but purists insist that an echt chicken soup must have, floating in it, at least three things ending in -lech and all you can see through Mitchell & O'Brien's too-clear version is a quartet of matzo balls. (That the menu quotes the Times's restaurant critic as saying that this is 'better than mother used to make' is neither here nor there: somehow I can imagine Jonathan Meades being raised on schmaltz and grieven.)
In fact the menu is more authentic, dish for dish, than the food. To take two staples of this sort of menu, the hot dogs are as good as any hot dog can ever aspire to be, but the boiled potatoes which accompany them might have come from Blooms's own kitchen, such is their waterlogged tepidity; the matchstick chips are every bit as good as Mon Plaisir's paradigms, while the steak they come with has (or at least it had on both the occasions I tried it) the texture of a particularly dense carpet underlay. On the other hand the sandwiches — grainy salt beef, feathery slices of spice-edged pastrami and the meltingly gungy reuben — are suitably hot and springily overfilled.
If it were just that the place served a good chopped liver and a creditable salt beef sandwich I wouldn't recommend it over any other Soho restaurant-bar. But the particular attraction of Mitchell 84 O'Brien is that it's rather a pleasant place to be. The decor is convincing, if not genuine Manhattan rather than one of the souvenir-poster representations offered by Bob Payton and Joe Allen. The aluminium tables and chairs scattered around the large dining-room have that Stateside look of articles crafted just postwar from the fusel- ages of B42 bombers. The bar at one end looks old rather than antiqued, the deli at the other sells take-home versions of some of the items on the menu.
Stick to Rolling Rock beer and a couple of good sandwiches and expect to paY around L15 a head.
The Nosherie: 12 Greville Street, London EC1, tel: 01-242 1591.
Mitchell & O'Brien: 2 St Anne's Court, London Wl, tel: 01-434 9941.
Nigella Lawson
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