Loving the matzos

Until last December, you could go to the Texas Department Of Criminal Justice's website and find comprehensive details of all its inmates' requests for last meals. Despite this being the single most popular piece of information on the site, the US's most prolific killer state stopped providing this information after a flood of criticisms that it was tasteless and demeaning.

You can still find the information though, at www.thememoryhole.org /deaths/texas-final-meals.htm. French fries are the most popular, hamburgers the second, with ice cream following close behind. Junk food and fizzy pop all the way.

It's a stupid question - 'What would you eat for a last meal?' Who would have an appetite for more than a soothing morphine milkshake? Nothing curbs the appetite like imminent execution.

The best analogy I can draw is going back to boarding school, which felt a bit like being on death row. You know what? My brothers and I always chose an array of junk food for our final meal - cheap Chinese takeaway, McDonald's, or anything advertised on the telly by Findus. I'm getting a love of salt, shared by death-row inmates and grizzling nippers alike.

Neatly, Harry Morgan's is my last local review (meet me on Gastropubs next week), and my dining companion, the Barefoot Doctor, used to come here for his final meal ('salt beef with tears') before going back to school. We, however, had a happy last repast, which was salty, but palatably so. The food at Harry Morgan's is comforting, but it's certainly not junk. It's Jewish, but not kosher.

There's a New York-deli feel and we were happy for this secular, not religious, vibe. The customers were a mixture of attractive St John's Wood kids and some handsome silver-haired couples. The decor is not frowsy or frumpy, there is bright, colourful - if not very good - art, and a wall of mirror to open the place up a bit. Magic FM, I'm reasonably sure, played in the background. It is, in decor, sit-down-chip-shop-meetsexpensive-Nineties bistro.

I loved the confident way they plonked a box of matzos on the table as we kicked off with chicken noodle soup with both types of dumplings, the plain kneidlach and kreplach, which are like dim sum stuffed with a dark, fairly flavourless meat. The stock was thick and tasted predominantly of chicken.

The dumplings were light in texture and not much to the taste buds - I like them more peppery. Fried gefilte fish was an egg-bound mix of ground fish, again barely seasoned, and deep fried in matzo meal. They didn't taste of much, but they came with a beetroot and horseradish sauce, which, unsurprisingly with these two ingredients, did.

In my experience of British-Jewish food, flavours are plain, flat and unrelieved by much evidence of seasoning. A couple of my Jewish mates call it 'tasteless slop', but they're just being rebellious. Harry Morgan's has a good way of doing things, and plain food that tastes good is not easy to come by these days.

The chopped liver was a treat scooped on to warm rye bread. I've eaten this before when it is far more finely ground, and it has a tacky, icky texture. Here, the sweet, baked chicken livers, minced up with egg, onion and oil, had a crumbly but nonetheless creamy quality.