Lunching at Reuben’s

FOR TWO YEARS or more, during the late 1970s, I went to Reuben’s on London’s Baker Street nearly every working day to buy lunch for my boss. Reuben’s was a strictly kosher establishment with a plaque in the window to say that the Beth Din of the Association of Synagogues regularly inspected the restaurant and its kitchens.

Its frontage was in royal blue and white with a blue neon star of David.

At lunchtimes, Marcus ran the downstairs deli bar. He wore embroidered skullcaps, bright bow ties, pin striped shirts, a wicked grin, was brash, quick-tempered, witty and mercilessly rude to staff and customers alike. The deli served-up all the usual kosher fare: Chopped chicken livers topped with specks of hard-boiled egg and parsley, potato latkes, roll mop herrings with onion, Russian salad, egg mayonnaise, gefilte fish, lockshen pudding, blintzes, kosher salami, cold roast chickens, and lox — smoked salmon, perhaps with bagels and cream cheese, or on crustless brown bread with black pepper and lemon juice.

In the daytime there was almost always a hot brisket of pinkish salt beef gilded with fat on the deli counter and, if not, a cut of spicy pastrami or tender roast beef. On the shelves were packets of matzos and tins of noodle soup, goulash and borscht with Hebrew labels.

Tony managed the family restaurant upstairs. He was quiet, polite, amenable, and I hardly ever saw him.

My boss ate salt beef almost every day of his life unless, unaccountably, he had a taste for a salad on a paper plate from Green’s, the sandwich bar down the road. A rare deviation from this routine was Reuben’s mixed grill, which descended from the restaurant kitchens packed in white, hinged polystyrene boxes. This was especially popular when he was entertaining important clients at the office. I never did get to see what was in those white boxes.

As you pushed open the glass door at Reuben’s, nudging aside a few people in the salt beef queue, the smell hit you. It was wonderful. I hadn’t been there then, but for years I imagined that this smell was Israel.

Groups of black coated, bespectacled gentlemen with wan complexions sat around on high stools drinking glasses of soda or lemon tea, with sour faces, coughing and munching on apple strudel.

Marcus would be on salt beef duty near the door, spectating on the cabs cutting-up cars and buses at the traffic lights and, in the summer months, ogling at superior office girls winding their way along Baker Street, his long knife and sharpening steel in hand.

A shrunken old woman with symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, referred to as ‘mother’ by Marcus and the rest of the staff, served shaky salads, teas and falafel at snail’s pace.

Marcus bickered constantly with the poor woman, complaining about her slowness and belittling her in front of the customers, who frequently joined in on one side or the other. I don’t know why she was treated so badly, but she was very hard of hearing, so the worst of the insults were probably lost on their way to her.

Many of Reuben’s customers were so ancient that they were barely able to force open the door or stagger back out clutching their paper bags. At lunchtime, the deli thronged with people unable to make up what was left of their minds, so that it was virtually impossible to see anything in the glass-fronted display cabinets for stooping bodies making “Um, er,” noises. The service was, at best, terse and forgetful, though it was generally acknowledged that the beef at the far end of the queue, which sometimes extended out onto the pavement was the best west of the Whitechapel Road, and Marcus, for all his faults, when on form was a good man to know; he was keen on horses and spent most of his afternoons priming the pay phone with silver in a seemingly endless discourse with the bookies.

My orders were simple: Pick up two hot, lean salt beef sandwiches, on rye bread with mustard, and a pickled cucumber then return swiftly to base before they got cold. If they were cold, or if the strip of fat on the beef was thicker than a five pound note, I’d be sent smartly back into the traffic. So, haggling with Marcus was usually time well spent.

I learnt, after months of trial, error and dissatisfaction, that my boss preferred the sandwiches when they had been re-heated in the Reuben’s microwave for a minute or two. Marcus didn’t care for this extra service because he couldn’t bring himself to charge my boss for it.

The first huge steaming brisket would arrive from the kitchens on a stainless steel salver awash with juices, at 12.30. On a good day they would get through three or four of these before 2.30. Marcus would transfer the brisket to the chopping board and spear it with long, wooden-handled butchers’ skewers. Then, carving could commence. The queue grew restless. Those at the front jostled for position. Some customers became frantic with blood lust as their turn for the Marcus Treatment approached...

“Shalom. How are you? Come on, come on! Where’s that goddam brisket? I’m waiting here ... Let’s go ... We’re in business ... Mother! Where are you with this man’s coffee, he’s been waiting fifteen minutes, already? Yes sir, who’s first for this lovely beef? You? Come on, one at a time, all right. You? Two on rye coming up. Mustard...? Mustard, sir? You want mustard? Hey! I’m talking to you, mister. OK, OK. Pickled cucumber...? No new greens today, I’m afraid. Sweet and sour only. Come on, come on, I haven’t got all day. Make your mind up! Yes, I told you that, already. Tea? No? Two pounds fifty ... now you want a latke? Three pounds. You got nothing smaller? Shit. Eat here or takeaway? Yes, it makes a difference, that’s why I’m asking. You think I’m asking because it makes no difference? You want I should wrap it up for you or you wanna eat it here and I’ll put it on a plate? It’s that simple! OK! Next! Yes, sir. Jesus Christ. What? Good afternoon to you too, sir ...”

Et cetera.

Salt beef. Fresh white bread or rye with caraway seeds, straight from the packet. No butter, of course. A Pyrex bowl of watery but powerful mustard, applied, when requested, with the back of a teaspoon. A sweet and sour ‘cucumber’ (a four-inch-long pickled gherkin) fished with a slotted spoon from a tin the size of a bucket. Simple.

“So, how is he today?” Marcus might ask me as he wiped the sweat from his brow with a heavily cuff-linked sleeve. “Miserable son of a bitch. Ah, the hell with him, eh? Wanna sandwich?”

It was absolutely essential that my choleric boss enjoyed his lunch. The smooth running of the company and the nerves of all his employees depended on it. Sometimes, if feeling low, I’d buy a couple of sandwiches for myself. They were expensive — a pound each even in those days — but as a rare treat the packed parcels of hot, succulent meat laced with mustard were irresistibly tasty and, after all, I was on a vital mission.

Out-of-towners or tourists would sometimes stroll blithely into the Reuben’s lunchtime fray. Marcus would see them coming and perhaps curse, not quite under his breath, in Hebrew. One of them would push his way, without malice, to the front of the seething queue, ignoring strict Jewish laws of deli etiquette, which are relaxed as a rule only for regulars, aged rabbis and the rich — preferably a blend of the three.

“What’s that?” this hapless day-tripper might ask Marcus, as he drooled adventurously over the fragrant lump of beef.

“Pickled pork, sir. Wanna try a sandwich? They’re one pound fifty each,” he would lie in a flash.

“Yes, please.”

All about, Reuben’s customers fell funeral still. The blasphemy turned heads and made frigid the once Yiddish rich air. The gents with the side locks, hats, beards, white shirts and chicken soup faces swivelled on their stools and began, fitfully, to snigger. “One pickled pork sandwich on rye. And a glass of milk for the gentleman, mother.”

That was Marcus for you.

“Mustard, sir?”

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