No visit to New York is complete without the ritual of queuing up at the counter of Katz’s, Zabar’s or the Carnegie Deli and braving a blizzard of scorn as you stumble through an order for corned beef on rye, matzo soup and chopped liver. In Edinburgh and Glasgow, eating in a deli doesn’t have quite the same sassy metropolitan glamour, but since the place where I regularly queue up for cheese and ham has a restaurant in the basement, it seemed worth a try.

Downstairs in Peckham’s in Edinburgh’s Bruntsfield is all dark wooden booths and velvet banquettes. Last week, the restaurant was running its Christmas menu alongside an extensive à la carte. This detail, almost unnoticed at the time of booking, would prove to have a disproportionate impact on what happened next. At the bottom of the stairs, an automated Santa jiggled around in an eerily silent Christmas salutation. The stage was set for an intimate early-evening dinner.

Some of the other guests were wearing party hats. A few had tinsel. We had rumbling stomachs.

From an extensive menu, we ordered a Thai fishcake and a risotto to start. The fishcake was fierily spiced, worryingly runny in the middle and nicely crispy on the outside. The risotto was made with sun-dried tomatoes and simply tasted wrong to me: too tomatoey, not creamy enough, dry and far more like a Mexican savoury rice than a risotto.

The portions were generous, though, even if one of the tomatoes on my plate was less than fresh. These imperfections, minor in themselves, would have faded into insignificance if the main courses had made an immediate appearance, scattering all before them and charming us with their chutzpah and larky charm. Unfortunately, there seemed to be something of a hold-up in the kitchen. Looking around, some tables were waiting for the Christmas menu. Some were waiting for the regular menu. All seemed to be waiting.

Time inched by. In New York delis, complex meals were being dispatched in the blink of an eye. In Edinburgh, everything was moving at the pace of an arthritic snail. At the bottom of the stairs, Santa wiggled to and fro silently. It would soon be Christmas.

When it finally decided to put in an appearance, the main course arrived with a mountain of expectation upon it. Madam’s chicken breast in harissa sauce and feta couscous seemed to leave her a little cold, possibly because it was a little cold itself. If there had been any prospect of seeing it again this year, it would have gone straight back — but there wasn’t, so it didn’t.

My venison sausages were pleasant enough, though I was left underwhelmed by the mashed potatoes with wholegrain mustard. Why have restaurants fallen for the idea of smushing up unpeeled potatoes and calling them mashed? So it was all down to the pudding to try and replace the grimace on my face with a beatific smile. To hedge our bets further, we went for a platter of three gooey cakes. When it arrived, our banoffee pudding, chocolate cake and cheesecake looked like a panto custard pie, a whipped cream frenzy that could have fed a family of 10 couch potatoes for a week.

By the end of the meal the service, sluggish for most of the previous hour, moved down a gear. Despite a good 10 minutes of straining round in my seat, waving at the waiting staff and making comical eye- popping gestures, I was still no closer to having my credit card put in the hand-held thingummy.

Defeated, I abandoned my efforts to pay by plastic, rooted around in my pockets and scraped together enough loose change, crumpled fivers and bits of shredded tissue to pay the bill. Then, summoning all my dignity, I stomped up the stairs. Nobody would have noticed if I’d done a runner. Not that I could have run anywhere after all those puddings.

Peckham’s Underground, 155-159 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh. Dinner for two with wine, £55

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