A brisket that’s better than Bubbie’s? Yes, it’s possible

“Today on her radio show,” boasted the deli’s owner, “Dr. Laura said, ‘Mr. Pickles’ brisket is the first step before adultery.’ ”

The first step before adultery? I’m not sure what that could mean. We know talk show host Laura Schlessinger takes adultery seriously, so maybe it’s her way of saying Mr. Pickles Deli makes serious brisket.

It certainly does. Brisket has a rich flavor but a regrettable tendency to cook up dry. Mr. Pickles’ version, which tastes like good, beefy pot roast (complete with a bit of carrot flavor, even a few visible bits of long-cooked carrot), is quite juicy.

What’s owner Yosef BeitHalahmi’s secret? If you order the brisket more than once, he’s likely to confide that he puts in some pineapple. Though that must contribute something, he also slices the brisket very thin and dips it in meat juices before stacking it up in the sandwich, so it’s sure to be juicy throughout.

The result is fairly spectacular, and whenever you come, the waiter will automatically suggest ordering it. Mr. Pickles Deli is the house that brisket built.

It’s also probably the closest strictly kosher restaurant to LAX, and it sells kosher shelf goods as well as food to go.

The menu is basically Israeli: European Jewish dishes with Middle Eastern touches, especially in side dishes. It avoids dairy products, going so far as to serve lox with tofu cream cheese.

By the way, Mr. Pickles makes terrific pickles. You get an appetizing vinegary bowl of carrots, peppers and turnips.

The soups are all good too. The mushroom barley soup uses a meaty broth, colored orange by carrots. One of the Middle Eastern touches is spicy Mediterranean lamb soup, flavored with cumin and red pepper. It’s like a sort of thin lamb chili that includes rice and garbanzos.

Sesame-crusted buns called burekas seem to be the best appetizers. The rectangular ones have a rich potato filling, the triangular ones a spinach filling with some sliced almonds.

A deli case is filled with salads -- sweet carrots, carrots spiced with cumin, hummus, cole slaw, baba ghannouj, potato salad, cucumber salad, plain garbanzo beans. The best is the relish-like one of eggplant cooked very brown and mixed with sweetish, very thick tomato sauce.

There’s a Tunisian tuna sandwich spiked with olives, capers, eggs and a tiny bit of red pepper sauce (unless you make it clear you want it very spicy). The corned beef sandwich can’t hold a candle to the brisket -- it’s certainly lean; a little too lean for its own good, in my opinion.

After this point, though, the menu is like rather plain home cooking. The roast chicken (not browned, perhaps to avoid drying it out) comes with horseradish sauce. The goulash is beef braised with just a little hot paprika, meaty but not exciting. (Chicken paprikash, which comes, like the goulash, with spaetzle-like egg dumplings, follows the same bland interpretation of Hungarian food.) The inoffensive stuffed cabbage is two large rolls with a very soft beef and rice filling, all in a mildly sweet tomato sauce.

The big surprise is the turkey meatloaf. It’s studded with biggish bits of carrot and rather bland by itself, but very good with the meaty, highly reduced turkey juices that accompany it. Sometimes the deli case has vegetable kugel, a sort of carrot and broccoli frittata sold in an aluminum tin. And sometimes there’s an oriental chicken salad spiked with sliced almonds and a whole lot of sesame seeds, all in a peppery vinaigrette, rather than the usual sweet-sour sauce.

There’s one distinctive and very impressive dessert -- halvah cake. It’s two thick layers of sesame halvah (one of them cocoa-flavored) stacked like cake layers and frosted with chocolate. BeitHalahmi saws you off a plank of it and charges by weight; it’s terrific, but so rich you might need a partner to help you finish that slice. And maybe that’s where the danger of adultery lurks.

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Mr. Pickles Deli

Location: 13354 Washington Blvd., Los Angeles; (310) 822-7777.

Price: Appetizers, $2.29 to $5.99; sandwiches, $3.99 to $10.99; entrees, $6.99 to $12.99.

Best dishes: Burekas, eggplant salad, brisket sandwich, turkey meatloaf, chocolate halvah.

Details: Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Friday. No alcohol. MasterCard and Visa.