Dining Out 024: Wilde's Deli at The White Horse
Dinner in Peckham.
After impotently going on for weeks about how more pubs should do sandwiches, for this “edition” of Dining Out I actually have a review of a pub that does sandwiches – or at least of a sandwich pop-up at a pub – for you to read.
The sandwich pop-up in question is Wilde’s Deli, who are making enormous Reubens and other Jewish deli-influenced sandwiches at The White Horse in Peckham until the end of the month. I really like the fact that pub kitchens, in some cases, seem to have diversified a bit past the “gastropub” thing, in order to give young food businesses – often more casual in timbre – space to do their thing, for a limited time, even though pop-up culture is a bit annoying generally (“yeah yeah it’s sick, it’s open Wed-Fri 12-4”). I wrote recently about how pub kitchens have become incubators for some of London’s best pizza, for example, but you do see all sorts.
The White Horse in Peckham tends to have a bit of a revolving door when it comes to pop-ups. It is admittedly not my favourite of the Peckham pubs – Guinness isn’t great, bit pricey, not very vibey on the whole – though it does have a great front garden, and they’ve had some interesting concepts in the kitchen in “recent years”.
One such concept was Mondo Sando, who are sort of the south east London Big Sandwich guys (I guess an analogue to Dom’s Subs in east), which also has a residency at the Grove House Tavern between Camberwell and Peckham, and will soon open Café Mondo, right next to Toad on Peckham Road (they’re calling it the Big Scrunchie Takeover).
I really like Mondo, who make creatively-filled and well-balanced sandwiches – more than enough crunch, lots of zing for the most part – and I first tried their food at The White Horse a while back, sort of setting me on a Path of Enlightenment regarding how good a context a pub is for a great sandwich: a chilled-out setting for a chilled-out, non-messy food, albeit one which can kind of tolerate a lot flavour-wise, which you need to stand up to the alcohol.
Wilde’s Deli are well aware of that, and when I walked the ten minutes from my flat to The White Horse to meet my pal Hannah and eat a massive sandwich, I was pleased that the recommendations I’d had from other gluten-loving pals felt correct, and I like the fact that Wilde’s are doing the Large American Sandwich thing a bit differently from most. In London recently, the dominant trendy style has been Italian, wherein hollowed out subs are filled with about seven different deli meats (I have long suspected that the fashion for this is a hangover from the fact that everyone watched The Sopranos for the first time in lockdown). Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy this kind of thing – show me a platter of salamis and you’re showing me a good time, you know – but I also welcome some difference.
Where Wilde’s are concerned, rather than stuffing bread with slippery wedges of Parmigiana or hotel bedsheet folds of mortadella and whatever gabagool actually is, they’ve gone another classic NYC route. Their Instagram, which I've seen a lot of lately, attests to their attempts to defy physics by balancing hulking towers of salt beef between thin slices of rye bread, with a dill pickle on the side for good luck, though it was the sandwiches on voluminous, airy challah rolls that really piqued my interest, as well as the fact that they’d posted up in a pub around the corner from where I live.
The menu is pretty simple. There’s a bunch of Jewish deli-style sandwiches, some classic, and some less so. It does, of course, include a Reuben, and if you choose this or the “Straight Up”, you get options in terms of your meat (smoked turkey or salt beef) and bread (rye or challah). Elsewhere there are extras like chips, a pickle plate, and – in especially “relevant to my interests” news – fried pickles and latkes.
Obviously, oily, fried food goes with a pint the way that a cig goes with an Aperol, and both of these little starters or side orders were, as expected, a very good accompaniment to a mid-level Guinness. A bowl of chips as you drink is pure satisfaction, of course, but sometimes you are looking for something a bit more interesting.
The latkes were super oily and all the better for it, my fingertips glossy as I tore them, and the shredded potato, with a little onion thrown in, came away from itself in fine strips as you pulled. With my knife, I spread “hot honey cream cheese schmear” all over each ripped bit of potato, and I tossed the pickles – breaded in panko, then fried – back into my gob like Scooby Snacks, the coating giving way to dill flavour and sharp crunchiness that hadn’t been lost to the deep-fryer.
The main event, however, was the sandwich, which came out a little while after these first bits. The beast in question was the “Phoenix” (I wanted to order a sandwich with salt beef barbacoa, but they were out – in the end I was glad because I tried something I wouldn’t necessarily have picked otherwise; there is a moral in there somewhere), which, between two halves of a challah bun, consisted of smoked turkey, cheese, kimchi, gherkins and brown mustard.
I’m a big Pickle Head so I especially loved the piquancy up against the white meat, which might have been too delicate to withstand it were it not for the fact that it was smoked. This gave it a real robustness, and a sort of base layer of flavour from which it felt like the rest of the sandwich was built.
The bread had that lustrous challah crust, substantial enough to withstand a bit of squishing, but not so hard that taking a bite was difficult (I think ease of eating is an important factor for a sandwich, particularly when you’re in the pub, which is a place where I personally never want to think about anything too much, other than, of course, saying the names of random footballers at whoever I’m sitting with). The regimented, layered filling meant that every mouthful was consistent, and though the whole thing was so enormous that I could only finish half, as I write this I’m pretty excited about the other bit that is currently waiting for me in the fridge like a war wife.
Wilde’s has had a lot of social media exposure over the last few weeks, and often, particularly with something as attention-grabbing as an extremely meaty sandwich, this can render the actual real life experience of eating a bit disappointing. Not so here – I loved my body pillow of a smoked turkey sandwich, and, as such, am looking forward to seeing where Wilde’s head to next.
I paid for this visit.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.
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