![]() When centuries of diaspora living met America's abundant beef supply in New York in the late 1800s, the deli staples of pastrami, corned beef and tongue were born. He even made a trip across the Atlantic to visit delis in London, Brussels, Paris and Krakow, Poland, one of the birthplaces of the modern Jewish deli.īound by "a proclivity for garlic and onions, and a reverential worship of schmaltz, or rendered fat," Sax writes, the Ashkenazi Jewish cultures of Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Russian empire developed kosher versions of local meat specialties. Montreal Toronto and a dozen other cities. But he also fanned out across North America to Denver Detroit Scottsdale, Ariz. On a two-month cross-country trip, Sax hit all the major deli hubs: Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and, of course, New York, even working for an evening as a counterman at the legendary Katz's deli on Manhattan's Lower East Side. But in "Save the Deli," a book that traces the rise and fall of Jewish delicatessens from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the suburbs of middle America, he makes that very claim. It certainly wasn't what Sax, a Toronto native who now lives in Brooklyn, expected to discover. To die-hard deli aficionados and sandwich fans, this assertion is heresy. And Los Angeles just happens to have more of them than any city I've been to." "It's a very difficult business to be in," Sax says, "but the that are most inspiring, the ones that people cling to, the ones that people enshrine for years and years are the traditional Jewish delis. And - perhaps surprisingly - he didn't find it in New York, the birthplace of the Jewish deli he found it here in Los Angeles. I had two bites and that was it."īut if Sax found the nadir of the Reuben, he also found its zenith. ![]() Bread that was just white bread painted a dark rye color. "Meat that had been pressed and pumped and vacuumed and torn apart to increase its yield in water but had no flavor. "What I got was this horrible abomination of plasticized cheese that tasted like it had come from a napalm plant," he says. It happened innocently enough, in an Arby's. It was in rural Kansas, near the geographical center of America, that David Sax hit rock bottom in his search for the perfect deli sandwich. ![]() Langer's pastrami sandwich "encapsulates perfection," author David Sax says. He explains why the City of Angels beats out New York and other contenders. That's the conclusion of 'Save the Deli' author David Sax. This was an amusing story to me, I thought maybe NYC would be considered the US' deli capital. ![]()
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