A few photos from my first visit (lunch) to The General Muir, the anticipated delicatessen from Ben and Jennifer Johnson (West Egg), Shelley Sweet (West Egg), and Todd Ginsberg (TAP, Trois, and more recently, Bocado).
We had a very promising lunch, and the restaurant was slammed at 11AM. I saw a few instances of servers wandering around with plates, unsure of their final resting place, but they seemed to be handling the capacity fairly well in their infancy. A few notes:
- My cortado was excellent. at Batdorf & Bronson worked on the coffee program, so I was unsurprised at the quality.
- Love the space.
- Pickled brussel sprouts – yes.
- They have good ice. Trivial? No.
- Best traditional style chopped liver I can recall. Really badass, actually.
- Burger and fries are very much in the style of the Bocado rendition, with enough variation to keep it unique. Different bun (better? don’t know, but I like the variety and it’s certainly not a bad one), “special sauce”, onion slaw, good pickles. I liked it. My brother said “it wasn’t greasy enough.”
- Pastrami was actually my least favorite dish. A little too chewy and fatty. I don’t mind fat, mind you, but it needs to be more tender to work in a sandwich. My incisors put in a double shift. The beef/cure flavor was over-powered by the already applied mustard. I’m nit-picking, but my standards for pastrami are high, and am of the thought that to be a great traditional deli of Jewish leaning, a mastery of pastrami and/or corned beef is required.
- Schmaltz potatoes – I don’t know what I was expecting, but they were regular breakfast potatoes. Not bad per se, but no schmaltz flavor. It’s like when places have ‘duck fat fries’ and there is no duck fat flavor but they cost $3 more. Weird fact about me – every time I hear the word schmaltz, I sing a made up song in my head, I sing The J.B’s song in my head, replacing the word ‘peas’ for ‘schmaltz’. I have no idea why.
- Latkes – top notch.
