by David Sax
The Langer’s pastrami sandwich is a sculpture of delicatessen that encapsulates perfection at every turn. The bread it rests between is the finest west of Detroit: two thick slices of caraway seed—infused, double-baked rye, still warm on the fingertips from the heat of the oven and cut fresh for each individual sandwich. Steamed until the pastrami is ready to disintegrate, the expertly carved sheets lie in a flat pile between the slices of bread. Most delis stack the meat in their sandwiches high in the middle, to give the illusion of size, but the Langer’s pastrami, still a respectable seven ounces, is consistent throughout, and every bite delivers equal amounts of meat. The pastrami itself boasts an almost surreal appearance; the color is too ruby, the slices too perfect to seem like something you can actually eat. Before the first bite, the tangy aroma of warm yeast, Romanian spices, and vaporized schmaltz teases the nostrils and entices the taste buds. It almost feels shameful to alter such perfection, but Al Langer’s handiwork is art that’s best consumed, not admired.
How do you describe the taste of a perfect pastrami sandwich? No matter what I write, it won’t be satisfactory. The specific flavor profile—at once peppery, smelling of the sea, and hinting of butterscotch—would sound contradictory and confusing. Any cute turn of phrase or illustrative metaphor—how the peppercorns and salt and sugars dazzled my taste buds like a Chinese New Year’s fireworks show going off in my mouth—would never measure up to the real thing. It is simply legendary, beyond any descriptive qualities I possess. As I tore through America’s finest sandwich that day in March, Al and Norm stood over me smiling.
L.A.’s family deli legacy had fortified the city’s ranks, but there was one small problem. The working environments of most family-run delicatessens are less apt to be Brady Bunch scenarios than they are to be a kosher-style version of King Lear. When family politics mix with matters of commerce, often the resulting animosity can be disastrous. I saw this first-hand when I went to Canter’s, on Fairfax Avenue.
In 1929, brothers Ben and Jerry Canter, who had owned a delicatessen in Jersey City, New Jersey, moved into the Boyle Heights neighborhood and opened up the Canter Brothers Delicatessen. Canter’s became so successful that during the Depression banks approached the deli for loans, and over the years it grew into L.A.’s largest delicatessen. Gary Canter, the grandson of founder Ben Canter, greeted me with a box of incredible rugelach, a platter of meats, and a heaping serving of aggravation. Since the death of his grandparents in the late 1970s, the deli’s ownership had been spread over various branches of children, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins. No fewer than nine different members of the Canter family held a stake in the deli and their authority was ambiguous. As one waitress put it to me, “It’s like nine chiefs and no Indians.”
Gary, whose responsibilities were mostly dealing with staff, was fed up. A fast-talking man, he could easily pass for a member of the Soprano crew with his perfectly coiffed hair and fancy tracksuits. Shuttling me through a rapid-fire tour of the giant delicatessen, he fired off salvos about the waste, mismanagement, and lost opportunities that had come from a business with too many hands in the jar of macaroons. Canter’s did an astonishing $8 to $10 million in annual sales, but Gary felt it could be as high as $18 million if his relatives agreed to modernize certain aspects of the business.
Everything worked on a haphazard basis, Canter said, pointing out the squeaking antique toasters at the rear of the deli. His brother Marc preferred to repair everything himself. Gary led me upstairs into a massive room jammed with junk, spare parts, and old equipment. “You see? You see?” Gary said, kicking antique vacuums out of his path. “Do you know what this junkhouse once was? Huh? It was a ballroom. Yeah. Lucille Ball and Bing Crosby used to come up here for banquets after the Oscars. This was a beautiful place where the history of Hollywood’s golden age unfolded, and now look at it,” he said, staring around in disgust. “Here, the wrong way is the right way.”
Staff acknowledged the confusion, but said it wasn’t as bad as Gary felt. The place just ran on instinct. People loved coming into Canter’s and watching the hubbub in action. It was an environment that brimmed with possibility and chaos, which is what drew people like Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles here in the 1960s. On a given night at Canter’s, you can find film students studying, NBC executives hashing out sitcom episodes, famed producer Michael Mann working feverishly on a script, and a waiter who is also an aspiring dancer practicing his pirouettes by the cash register. One of L.A.’s up and coming bands will be tuning up in the Kibitz Room, an adjoining bar and club that is the dark, boozy footnote to the bright hubbub of Canter’s. Frank Zappa used to play there, and Lenny Bruce would occasionally perform impromptu gigs, though more often he’d score heroin in the bathroom. The Red Hot Chili Peppers jammed there, and the Wallflowers crafted their sound on the Kibitz stage, but the most famous group to emerge out of the Kibitz Room was Guns N’ Roses, whose picture still hangs behind the bar.
Canter’s at night was like New York’s Katz’s meets Alice in Wonderland. The trippy decor, including plastic owls spinning on the roof exhausts, added to the funhouse charm. I can’t say whether the food suffered because of what Gary said. Some dishes were better than others, and the baked goods were among the best anywhere, especially the chocolate rugelach. Yet there was something deeply unsettling about the ten-dollar bill Gary Canter slipped a waiter to make sure no one touched my briefcase while we walked around. In any other delicatessen, the owner’s word should have sufficed.
Gary wanted some form of escape and he’d found it in Las Vegas. In 2004, he had opened a Canter’s branch in the Treasure Island casino. “Vegas is my dream,” he said, cherries spinning in his eyes. “In Vegas they have fine-tuning. They have rules. They have a system.” On some days, the Las Vegas location pulled in more money than the Fairfax delicatessen. Soon, Gary hoped to open another outlet in Mandalay Bay with even bigger payoffs. “I just can’t use my time to play with my fucking family. Why break my back? If this works out with Mandalay Bay, they’ll be giving me fifty thousand dollars a month! Who could refuse that check coming to their house?”
Gary Canter wasn’t the only one thinking Las Vegas. All over America I’d met deli owners with designs for the desert. As David Mendelson told me, “I sure as hell don’t plan to be busing tables, cleaning washrooms, and changing light bulbs forever.”
Las Vegas: Luck Be a Brisket Tonight
The concept of Las Vegas as a deli Mecca isn’t too far a stretch of the imagination. After all, it was delicatessen-loving, New York Jewish gangsters like Bugsy Siegel who transformed the city from a Mormon frontier outpost into an oasis of green felt, free booze, and busty broads. Caesars Palace was started by Jewish “businessmen” Jay Sarno, Nate Jacobson, Moe Dalitz, and Morris Kleinman. Sam Tucker opened the Desert Inn, while Hyman Abrams, Carl Cohen, and Jack Entratter ran the Sands.
A few individual delicatessens did exist in Vegas’s swinging heyday. In the delicatessen at the Flamingo, Catskills comedians Myron Cohen and Freddie Roman would share late-night pastrami and corned beef sandwiches with crooner Tom Jones. Foxy’s Delicatessen, started by Abe Fox in 1966, was close to the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara, and Jackie’s Deli was a favorite hangout for sports bookies. The last of Vegas’s old-school delis was Max C’s, owned by the larger than life Max Corsun, who used his deli in downtown Las Vegas as a pulpit to reward friends and attack his political enemies. Max C’s closed shortly after Corsun died in 2002.
These delicatessens were part of old Las Vegas, which has mostly disappeared. Its hotels, like the Sands, were theatrically demolished with dynamite and fireworks. The new Las Vegas, a gargantuan playground that magically sells the city as a sort of Disneyland with whores, is where out-of-town delicatessens want to make their mark. While old Vegas was the sinister kingdom of the underworld, new Vegas came to life under the guise of corporate America. And although a taste of old Vegas lives along the dollar blackjack tables of Freemont Street and the
champagne rooms of obscure strip clubs, it is the family-friendly Vegas that calls the shots. Even though the recent advertising slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” is uttered by shmucks everywhere, a large part of Vegas’s infrastructure caters to the American family.
With regard to food, the days of casinos offering all-you-can-eat shrimp buffets may not be over, but it has been superseded by an even greater indulgence. Casinos have brought in the world’s celebrity chefs, built giant palaces of gaudy gastronomy, staffed the kitchen, and mailed checks. All the chef has to do is create or approve a few new dishes, appear on the rare occasion (flown in on a private jet and put up in a luxury suite), grace the hundred-foot television screens around town, and smile. With an army of restaurant consultants and designers at their disposal, the developers of Las Vegas casinos have managed to conquer the last stranglehold of independent eating in America, turning the upper end of the food chain into another packaged concept.
Now it was the turn of the Jewish delicatessens. With names like Canter’s, Carnegie, and Stage already established in Las Vegas, others were vying for a slice of the action, enticed by the casinos. Again, it made sense for both parties. Delicatessens, by nature family-run businesses, had reached the max in profits they could squeeze from a single location. No matter how many bowls of matzo ball soup Nate n’ Al sold in a week, there’d be a limit. But in Vegas, with forty million tourists flying in annually, costs paid by the casino, and a systematized management and production system, they could rake it in. Across the nation, deli owners spoke about Vegas with the same unbridled excitement their forefathers in the shtetl spoke of America. One thing was for sure; these wouldn’t be haymish, family-operated delicatessens. They’d be franchised and licensed versions of the original, with an eye on maximum profits for all involved.
“Equity partners are looking for concepts,” the food purveyor Jon Startz said back in Los Angeles. “They’re not looking for a great restaurant. They are looking for something there can be a thousand of.” If it could work in Vegas, I was told, why not elsewhere? Las Vegas was the front line for Jewish delis that could spread to malls nationwide. It was deli ready to take a slice of America’s fastfood pie. Many deli owners saw it as their future, but what kind of future did Las Vegas really promise?
Before hitting the Strip, I wanted to see what action there was away from Las Vegas Boulevard. With an exploding Jewish population, Las Vegas certainly had enough numbers to support a local deli or two, and I needed a baseline comparison to judge the casino delis against. In Henderson, the city on the far end of the Las Vegas airport, Weiss Bakery and Deli opened in March 2006.
Originally from New Jersey, Michael Weiss had been working in the restaurant business since he was a kid and had lived in Las Vegas for over half his life. Seeing the absence of true Jewish delicatessens in the area, he set about rehabilitating a deli called Samuele’s with his Turkish-born wife, Aysegul, with the sort of mom-and-pop attitude that now seems foreign to the Vegas formula. A tall energetic man with a positive grin glued onto his face, Weiss reveled in every challenge the deli business threw at him. As he made a brisket sandwich on the eggy challah bread he’d baked himself that morning, he told me, “Here, the challenge was perfecting what I had. So I took the recipes that were here already and tinkered with them. I used a lot of my grandmother’s recipes, and I went back to making everything I could from scratch.”
Weiss pickled his own corned beef and tongues, cured and smoked his own pastrami, and baked his own bread and pastry. Nothing went to waste. The fat skimmed from his soup was rendered into schmaltz, which made its way into the matzo balls, the finely diced chopped liver, and his kasha varnishkes. In my previous experiences, I’d never really discovered the appeal of this starchy side dish of bowtie pasta and buckwheat. I often found them dry and bland. Weiss showed me otherwise.
“The trick with kasha is that you sauté the onions in butter, schmaltz, and olive oil until they are caramelized. Then, you toss the kasha groats in a hot pan, without the onions. After a few minutes the kernels will separate, and then you add it all together.” The bowties with fat kernels of kasha were covered in a rich, chocolate-colored homemade beef gravy. Flavored by the sweet, fat-drenched onions, the individual kashas burst in my mouth like moist beans.
Weiss Bakery and Deli reminded me of Jimmy and Drew’s 28th Street Deli in Boulder, Colorado, where a pride in ownership of the food had turned out so much promise in such a short period of time. It was an attitude of deli owners that had long faded from the landscape, but Weiss knew that if his name was on the door, he had to answer directly to customers. “If it says Weiss, it has to be nice,” Weiss said half-jokingly, before reflecting on the delis inside casinos, where I was heading that night. “Those guys are doing it to get a paycheck. I’m doing it because I love cooking.”
8:00 Greenberg’s Deli, New York, New York Casino and Hotel
Once again, my deli odyssey kicked off in the Big Apple, or in this case, a soundstage replica of New York. The sprawling complex boasted a mini-Brooklyn Bridge, mini-Empire State Building, and in an ode to modern-day Manhattan, a small Starbucks. Down in the pint-sized Lower East Side/Little Italy/East Village, where café patios pushed onto the “worn brick street,” was Greenberg’s Deli. Gigantic couples sat in matching NASCAR T-shirts, their ample flesh stuffed like kishke into advertisement-laden casing. At the best of times, Las Vegas attracted the very kind of big eaters often seen at New York’s midtown delis with whole sandwiches visible in their throats like a snake’s dinner. But I’d lucked out. My visit coincided with Vegas’s NASCAR race. The largesse was abnormally high, even for a city that sold deep-fried Oreos at ninety-nine cents per bag.
Greenberg’s Deli was not affiliated with any deli past or present. In the plate-glass window, a giant neon bagel shone blue and red with the words Greenberg’s Delicatessen flanked by two stars of David. The floor had the requisite checker tiling, and raised shelves were stocked with neatly arranged jars of Manischewitz gefilte fish and boxed matzos. I looked at the short menu hanging above the counter and asked the woman working the register what was homemade. “Ummm, like, I’m sure something?”
Scanning the board, I picked out the few items that would actually appear in a Jewish deli. Mesquite Grilled Chicken toasted sandwich? Not likely. Homemade chicken matzo ball soup? Sure. Smoked Ham and Colby Jack Cheese toasted sandwich? I hoped not. Greenberg’s Reuben? Okay. But aside from an egg cream, bagel, lox and cream cheese, and a black and white cookie, it seemed like standard sandwich shop fare. I opted for the matzo ball soup, figuring it was the toughest to screw up. I got two midsized, pale matzo balls in a little paper bowl filled with dark, onion-colored soup.
I unwrapped my plastic spoon and dug in, slicing a matzo ball that had the firm consistency of a baked apple. Searching for a taste, I soon realized that I’d found none. The soup tasted not of chicken, but of water, bouillon, and celery. Nothing resembling a chicken had ever come close to it. I tossed the soup in the trash, walked over to the nearest blackjack table, and lost five consecutive hands.
9:00 P.M.: Stage Deli, Caesars Palace Forum Shops, Caesars Palace
Over the years, New York’s Stage Deli had opened franchises and licensed outlets in Cleveland, Atlanta, Boston, Atlantic City, and Los Angeles. All except Las Vegas and Atlantic City (in the Taj Mahal casino) had closed when I arrived in Vegas. In New York, Stage’s owner Steve Auerbach told me that the out-of-town branches were extremely troublesome, because you couldn’t control the quality. At one point, there was a Stage Deli in Bally’s, the Flamingo, and two in the mgm Grand.
When I visited, there was just one Stage Express kiosk in the MGM Grand, and a full-service restaurant at Caesars Palace. The Broadway-style marquee of the Stage Deli of New York rested between two giant columns amid the Forum Shops, a luxury mall catering to the gaudy tastes of high rollers. The Stage Deli represented its famous namesake on 7th Avenue quite well, despite the fact that it was twice the
size of the original. The long deli counter had the right look—topped with brushed steel and etched glass panels, but there was no steam wafting in the air, no clatter, and no deli smell. It felt a bit too sterile to come close to the Stage’s beloved tumult. The half a corned beef sandwich and bowl of cabbage soup I ordered came to only $9.99, a fraction of what I’d have paid at the original. The Stage in New York had to pay over a million bucks in rent each year, while this was a building where people traveled great distances just to surrender their money.
When it arrived, the cabbage soup was packed so densely with cabbage that I could hardly find any bits of meat or even tomatoes. It had sufficient tang, but little else, like glue stock doused with some pepper. My half sandwich arrived, and I pushed the soup aside. It was on caraway-seeded rye, which, while lacking any crunch to the crust, didn’t taste awful. It was easily half to two-thirds smaller than the gargantuan monstrosities they served on 7th Ave. Unfortunately, the corned beef was too lean and tasted like it had withered in the freezer. Unsurprisingly, the Stage Deli closed just over a year later.
11:00 P.M.: The Carnegie Deli, Mirage Hotel and Casino
Here, once again, the Stage shared the same block with its rival the Carnegie. Carnegie’s Las Vegas operation opened in 2005, just beyond the Mirage’s shrine to Siegfried and Roy. It was the first expansion for the delicatessen since its unsuccessful franchises in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Carnegie, like the Stage, had opened seven new locations around the country, licensing the name to local owners. The franchises almost always opened with great fanfare and closed shortly after in quiet disgrace. The problem, according to Carnegie’s current owner, Sandy Levine, was that Carnegie’s old owner, Milton Parker (Levine’s father-in-law), had no control over their far-flung outposts. Local owners who were trying to recuperate investments cut costs by using inferior products from other suppliers. No two Carnegie delis would be serving the same pastrami. It was an unsustainable situation.