Mishkin's, Covent Garden, restaurant review On the one hand, Talmudic scholars will confirm, eating out on the Day of Atonement lies outside the mainstream of what Topol knew in song as traaaaah-disssshhh-unnn. On the other, if a Jew is to ignore the Fast, where better to do so than at a restaurant describing itself "a kind of Jewish deli with cocktails"? That notion is a contradiction in itself, since the last thing on a Jewish diner's mind is the booze. Apparently the cocktails are great, but my friend (a goy) and I eschewed them for a delicious Côtes du Rhône called Perrin, with which we proposed to toast the memory of Reggie of that ilk. If the carafe's prompt arrival was an early sign of inauthenticity - it should of course have been 11 minutes late due to a signal failure at Surbiton - here it was not alone. Now, I didn't get where I am today by failing to appreciate the distinction between a "sort of Jewish deli" and a real one. It would be faux-naiveté gone mad to expect somewhere serving pork on Yom Kippur not to tend toward the ersatz. What you would also expect is that classic Ashkenazi dishes taste vaguely as they should, and here Mishkin's fails miserably. This perplexes because its owner Russell Norman (no relation) is the cleverest restaurateur of his generation. With his Venetian wine bar/small-plate Soho joints Polpo and Polpetto, he infused the central London dining scene with a (then sorely needed) dash of freshness and buzz - to go with reliably excellent cooking. At Mishkin's, he replicates the formula, with one exception: the cooking is mediocre. Slow roast lamb, celeriac mash and pickled cabbage is on the menu at Mishkin's "It's as if all the energy went into the design," said my friend over a starter of bland, gin-cured salmon with pickled apple and beetroot, while I toyed with a slab of chopped liver offering no hint of the fried onion that gives the dish its savour, "and the food is barely an afterthought. But I do like the Art Deco-ish frontage, and the look of this room. With its black and white chequerboard flooring, recovered timber walls, crumbly brickwork and strip lighting, Mishkin's cutely melds the flavour of the post-war East End caff (fizzy drink cans displayed on a shelf) with a traditional American diner ("rest rooms" is the styling for the loos). The booths with red banquettes looked particularly inviting from our nook beneath a skylight, at a weeny table so close to its neighbour that one involuntary twitch of the knee could have you up before the nearby Bow Street beaks on a harassment charge. Fishcakes came with a version of "chrain" (a horseradish and beetroot sauce) far too prissified to lend any kick to comfort food, and were "a bit light on taste, but fine." My "Brick Lane salt beef with Colman's" was not fine. To our delightful waitress's inquiry "Do you want it with or without fat?," the answer had been "Do you think I acquired a body like this by rejecting fat?" The beef came not only depressingly lean, however, but dried out, startlingly anodyne, and encased in rye bread that disintegrated at the faintest touch. "I see your table manners haven't improved," said my friend as a rivulet of mustard splattered the shirt. Not that I don't enjoy them. I like the feeling that I'm well bred. "East End chips," a phrase presumably deployed in homage to the Jewish immigrants who first served fish and chips to the hungry Cockneys of Whitechapel, were brilliant. But the genteelness of pickled cucumbers, dill and "half sours" was as much an affront to decency as the absence of that garlicky prince of pickles, the New Green. The one ray of authenticity was the size of the portions (such poor food, as another old joke doesn't quite have it... and so much of it). So we shared a lone pudding in which outstanding chocolate ice cream was paired with a brittle, superheated chocolate chip cookie. But weak and bitter coffee was a final sign of sloppy insouciance. Earlier this year I had the best salt beef sandwich of my life at Gaby's Deli, which was threatened with imminent closure at the time, but has happily since been spared by its landlord, the Marquess of Salisbury. Norman should send his kitchen staff to Gaby's on a study trip forthwith. Still, better a soggy sandwich than a lightning bolt. The stern God of the Old Testament would surely have smitten the socks off anybody who had the temerity to visit a "kind of Jewish deli" when they should have been atoning - with prayer, and a rumbling tummy.