Howard Jacobson: Hungry for real pastrami and a bracing dose of rudeness? Head to a New York deli

The waitress was built like Sylvester Stallone - perhaps waiting for a part in 'Rocky VII' - so I didn't argue

I am trying to work out what made me return to the Stage Deli on Seventh Avenue, within a whiff of Broadway, while I was in New York last week. I'd made myself a promise, the last time I ate in the Stage Deli, never to go there again, not even if I was dying of pastrami-deficiency and the Stage was the last deli on the planet. The food hadn't been the problem, the waitress had. Call it her all-round demeanour in the prosecution of her duties. Call it her interpretation of at-table decorum. Or, not to beat about the bush, call it her passing wind over my Reuben sandwich.

We laugh here at the American deli sandwich for being enough to feed a small city. But it isn't the amount of pastrami or corned beef that makes a sandwich Reubenesque, it's the moistness of the meat. In this country – with the honourable exception of the Brass Rail at Selfridges – salt beef is served so dry you can't swallow it without taking in that same small city's supply of water with every mouthful. But even that's better than having a waitress wait until you're a third of the way through, relaxed and off guard, and then, having checked that everything's to your satisfaction, turn her heavy hindquarters on you and pass wind. In fact, wind doesn't adequately describe what she passed. They are often waiting for a part on Broadway, these waitresses. So, along with obesity and bad diet, factor in the tension of frustrated ambition. Nothing else could explain the violence or venom of the stale air she fired off, like a puffball of explosives in a kid's comic. And directed into the very heart of my Reuben. The part I'd been saving.

But it was what followed that finally decided me against the Stage Deli. "Enjoy your sandwich?" she asked as I was leaving. "The sandwich," I said, "I loved. Especially the first third." "Then explain this," she said, opening the palm of her hand and showing me the dollar tip I'd left. Not enough, apparently. A dollar tip doesn't cover a $10 sandwich and the head-waitress's wind. I know what I should have done. I should have taken the dollar from her, told her to desecrate some other sucker's lunch, and left. But I did the cowardly, when in New York do as the New Yorkers do, thing. I gave her another dollar and slunk into the bracing, evil cacophony of the streets.

Yet there I was again last week, looking for a table for three friends I'd invited to join me. "No sitting down until your guests arrive," a waitress (not the same waitress) told me. "But then I'll lose the table," I said. She shrugged. She was built like Sylvester Stallone – perhaps waiting for a part in Rocky VII, The Musical – so I didn't argue. "Stand at the bar," she said. So I stood at the bar. Next to me a man was asking if it was possible to order half a sandwich. The waiter shook his head. One of those Mafia no-can-do shakes of the head that follows your dropping to your knees and begging for your life. "Move closer to the bar," the Sylvester Stallone waitress ordered me.

I was relieved when my friends rang to say they'd confused delis and were in the Carnegie a block away. "I'll come to you," I said, eyeballing the waitress with triumphant malice. Had I been the sort of person who can pass wind at will I'd have got my own back as I left. But I was a small city boy and had been brought up on the principle that you keep the body's outrages to yourself.

Over at the Carnegie my friends were having trouble holding a seat for me. "You can't put a coat on that chair," an elderly waitress with a gouge of lipstick across a broken face was telling them. "It'll cost you 12 bucks." She looked furious when I arrived. "It's not my rule," she said. "There are cameras watching every chair." There's no waste at the Carnegie. You can't have three on a table for four, or seven on a table for eight, or 99 on a table for 100 and not expect them to shove another person in the empty space. At the furthest end of the room they were squeezing 12 Japanese on to a table for six, two to a chair.

Our food came smothered in Swiss cheese. Everything yellow, even the corned beef. Delicious, in its own way. But every bite was tense. The tables were filling up, the queue for the cash desk was spilling back into the restaurant, the waitresses were saying no to everything, and we were expecting another person. She arrived late, not meaning to eat, carrying a cardboard coffee from Starbucks. I'm not sure how the waitress managed not to pass wind. "I'll have to charge you at least $12," she exploded. We couldn't wait to get out, no matter how yellow the sandwiches.

So what was I doing returning to this 10th circle of Deli hell? Trying to put a bit of incivility back into my sense of America, that's what. In my three weeks touring I'd found the Americans uncharacteristically – and to be honest about it, distressingly – subdued. They appeared to have lost their razzle-dazzle. Their heads were down. Suddenly to be English in America was not to feel small fry. And I didn't like it.

It's the fault of the weak dollar partly. It's no fun for Americans knowing they can't afford to go to Europe next summer, or having to watch their once-poor English cousins jingling sterling and buying everything in sight. But it's the shame of Bush as well. And health care. And Iraq. And now Iran which they have a sickening feeling they can't do a damn thing about.

By a strange coincidence my book tour was bracketed between the two most recently televised Democratic Party debates. I arrived to watch Hillary lose ground to Edwards and Obama, and I left as she was clawing it back; but slick and articulate as they all undoubtedly were – especially Joe Biden from Delaware, who is too funny to be electable – they lacked the big theme. Repair work is all any of them is offering. Making good the inequities at home. Making good their lost reputation overseas. No eloquent pugnacity. No grand dreams of national greatness. Just a calming of nerves.

So I went to the Stage and Carnegie Delis to remind myself of how people who once believed they were the centre of the universe used to act. There's rude vitality in swagger and I was missing it.