That Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is called Panzer’s – for the instrument of Blitzkrieg – is mad, until you remember that Jews love to eat near catastrophe, and then it is merely funny. I love Panzer’s so much I am reluctant to share it, but we need all the friends we can get. I keep telling non-Jewish friends: when we burn, you will burn with us. Though I mean it as consolation, they tend to run.
St John’s Wood has always existed on the edge of hysteria. Edwardian psychopaths put their mistresses here, and I once went to a children’s birthday party where Peppa Pig couldn’t park, and there was a fight with recriminations. The high street sells corsetry and facial reconstruction.
I have never had bagels this good, not even in New York City
I remember Panzer’s as a greengrocer that sold challah (bread plaited like hair, because who cares?) but it has, in what liberal newspapers call End Days Capitalism, upgraded itself to café, takeout joint and seller of hampers: that is, it is the Jewish Fortnum & Mason, and its glassy eyes overlook the remnants of a library. It is 80 years old, fabulously clean and it seethes with rage.
‘Why are you staring at me?’ a woman shouts, as I move aside due to a bottleneck caused by an olive oil demonstration and babies. ‘I am being polite!’ I shout back. This is not abnormal. Rather, I am home.
First, the bagel counter. I have never had bagels this good, not even in New York City. I have the smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel, and it does everything a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel can, and should, do: and some things it shouldn’t. It was overfilled, as good bagels are, and it falls to the ground as I eat it, but even thinking about it makes me feel like a wild animal. Get bagels nowhere else, and don’t forget the onion. Get them on Sundays, and pretend you live inside a colour magazine supplement. There are worse lives.
The café is outdoors: it is manned by someone impersonating a psychiatric nurse. Of course I wonder: when will you crack? Now? The portions are vast: the food (chicken schnitzel; hamburger) is too generic for Jewish food, but this is St John’s Wood, not Poland or Finchley, and it isn’t Jewish food. It is brasserie food, and it is fine.
The delight, though, is the grocer’s: rows of prepared meals lit like Judy Garland. But kosher! And alive! (At least for things that are, by definition, dead.) The honey cake has a density – a fury – no sponge cake has a right to. The Panzer’s mini-roll – it is not called that – is a maxi-roll. It could eat itself.
My complaint is the same complaint that I have about Nobody Wants This, the Netflix romance between a ‘hot rabbi’ who isn’t hot and a non-Jewish woman who looks like an elf. (Season two is here: this whining is topical.)
People dislike Nobody Wants This because it is a collection of stereotypes, and it is, but I don’t mind the stereotypes, which are largely true. (I mind the guns.) Rather, Nobody Wants This is lacking in Jewish intellect and identity – it makes Jews sound like a curiosity, monied Hobbits or Druids, but angry – and I make the same complaint of Panzer’s. Even if it is a deli. Katz’s in New York City is heftier, but we are British Jews, and our deli sells A Taste Of Luxury This Christmas, and there it is.
Panzer’s Delicatessen, 13-19 Circus Road, London NW8; 020 7722 8162.
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