When a Deli Goes Boutique

IT is not the place you expect to find a Jewish deli, this preening stretch of Bond Street between Bowery and Lafayette, hemmed in by glistering condominiums of limestone, bluestone, flamed granite and green glass, with dripping vines, secret pools and hulking doors that might better fit the entrance to Tolkien’s Mines of Moria.

Yet here among the monoliths stands Mile End Sandwich, the new Manhattan offshoot of Mile End deli in Brooklyn.

Then again, Mile End Sandwich looks more like a Helmut Lang boutique than an appetizing shop. The chopped liver is made with duck jus, the smoked turkey sandwich layered with turkey rillettes. The brisket comes from pastured Angus cows. And portions run small, at least by Carnegie Deli standards. (Let the caviling begin.)

The original Mile End was opened by a married couple, Noah Bernamoff (a Canadian) and Rae Cohen (a New Yorker), in Boerum Hill in early 2010, in a cramped former garage retrofitted with vintage Woolworth’s stools and pharmacy lamps. It soon had crowds clamoring for the Quebec innovation of smoked meat that falls somewhere between pastrami and corned beef.

Mile End Sandwich lacks the homeyness and pluck of its Brooklyn progenitor. It is a stark box of concrete floors and white walls in zigzag subway tile, with canted Stonehenge-esque lights above and a glossy black counter in back. A high, jagged communal table forks through the room. When the restaurant opened, in April, no stools were provided. This has been rectified, although you still get the feeling that lingering is discouraged.

The roster of sandwiches, more expansive than in Brooklyn, reads like a family album of the Jewish diaspora. (The lineup of breads alone is an incantation: rye, pumpernickel, pletzel, challah, weck, pita, poppy, onion.)

Here are the Canadians, represented by smoked meat ($12) — hand-carved to order, rosy with flaking bits of char, juicier and more peppery than pastrami — and salami, fried to release its garlicky oils and tucked into an onion roll swabbed with mustard ($8). The latter is an homage to the signature sandwich at Wilensky’s in Montreal, where the nonagenarian proprietress fines customers 10 cents to hold the mustard.

There is the pride of Buffalo, feather-light slices of roasted beef — Wagyu, if you please — piled on weck ($12), a caraway-studded roll whose bulging, twisty top suggests a challah devouring itself. A broadside of horseradish wakes you up.

But a straightforward sauerkraut-topped beef hot dog ($7) is mousy, Coney Island in winter. It is overshadowed by its exotic Tunisian cousin, smoked lamb sausage ($10), with a slaw inflamed by harissa (a North African chile paste) and a bun shot through with za’atar (a nutty spice blend of sumac, sesame and thyme).

Oldies get arty remixes, some inspired, like the pairing of smoked turkey with turkey rillettes ($12), and some perplexing, like the chopped liver ($9), oddly slick, perhaps from that highfalutin duck jus.

Fat golden raisins cling to scarlet slices of what proves to be yieldingly tender pickled veal tongue, between rough-hewn wedges of inky-black pumpernickel ($12). It is the kind of sandwich that sparks flirtations with strangers.

Chicken salad ($10), on the other hand — studded with gribenes (chicken-skin cracklings), gently kissed with mayo, crunchy with barely brined cucumber, flaring with sunbursts of sweet pickled peppers, all on challah gilded with schmaltz — is something you want to keep to yourself.

Of course there are bagels ($3 with a schmear), albeit of the Montreal variety, slightly honeyed, dense and, yes, smaller. Is this a theme? Is it truly a deli if the sandwiches don’t topple? Quibbling is part of the fun.

A few blocks, and a world, away is Katz’s, the real thing since 1888. Surely there is room enough in this town for both the prodigy and the maestro.