Recently, I had lunch during the week around 1:30pm at J & E with a friend who is 89 years old. The restaurant was not busy. The hostess, a young Latina woman, was showing us to a table. My friend stopped at the first large booth to catch his breath. The hostess proceeded to a booth at the far end of the main dining room. I asked her if we could sit at the first booth as my elderly companion was clearly out of breath and having difficulty walking. She said, "You can sit here," and pointed to a table that was still some distance away. I said to here, "That table is just as far." She said, "Look, I have to sit people in the different sections or otherwise I'll get fired." I found this comment to be very flippant and extremely insensitive to a customer's needs. Are the staff taught to be so inflexible, that they are incapable of dealing with a customer's specialneeds?

There's no truly great deli anywhere near Boston that I know of (and that includes the Brookline options), but we do enjoy our time in the booths at Joan & Ed's well enough to make it a fairly regular stop. The pickles are good, the deckers are filling and tasty enough, and sometimes the latkes are okay. Anyway, give it a try, it's a good place to sit and eat and talk.

If you've never been to an authentic Jewish deli, then this might seem ok. I just can't get by the fact that I expect a slight pull on the crust and slight sour taste to the light rye bread in a deli sandwich. Instead, what I got here tasted like packaged white bread! The corn beef tasted like it's been around for a year or two. The potato latkas are like greasy lead.