Search for the perfect deli disses New York for L.A.

Author travels history, country for stellar sandwiches

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. It happened innocently enough, in an Arby’s. He had ordered a Reuben.

“What I got was this horrible abomination of plasticized cheese that tasted like it had come from a napalm plant,” he says. “Meat that had been pressed and pumped and vacuumed and torn apart to increase its yield in water but had no flavor. Bread that was just white bread painted a dark rye color. It was horrendous. And it was microwaved. I had two bites and that was it.”

But if Sax found the nadir of the Reuben, he also found its zenith. And — perhaps surprisingly — he didn’t find it in New York, the birthplace of the Jewish deli; he found it in Los Angeles.

“It’s a very difficult business to be in,” Sax says, “but the (delis) 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 Los Angeles just happens to have more of them than any city I’ve been to.”

To die-hard deli aficionados and sandwich fans, this assertion is heresy. It certainly wasn’t what Sax, a Toronto native who now lives in Brooklyn, expected to discover. 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.

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 he also fanned out across North America to Denver; Detroit; Scottsdale, Ariz.; St. Louis; Cleveland; Las Vegas; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Montreal; Toronto; and a dozen other cities. 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.

Early roots

Selling from pushcarts, early Yiddish food vendors faced increasing restrictions and evolved to bricks-and-mortar restaurants. But it was America’s obsession with the sandwich, according to Sax, that catapulted Jewish delis “from an obscure immigrant food to an American cuisine.” In Los Angeles, delis had yet to make their mark; that would come later as the descendants of New York’s first wave of Jewish settlers migrated west.

The 1930s were boom deli years, with a second generation of immigrants finding more stability and prosperity while catering to a clientele concentrated in New York’s Jewish enclaves.

At the same time, the traditional kosher deli gave rise to the kosher-style deli, also known as the Jewish or New York deli, that predominates today.

Driven by the rise of supermarkets, decreased Jewish immigration, changing eating habits, fewer mono-ethnically Jewish neighborhoods and uniquely low profit margins in the deli business, the post-World War II years marked the beginning of the decline for delis.

Yet Los Angeles delis have managed to thrive in a niche market. Acre for acre, Sax maintains that Southern California boasts “more delicatessens of higher quality, on average, than anywhere else in America.” Sax’s highest praise is for Langer’s, near L.A.’s MacArthur Park — where the pastrami sandwich “encapsulates perfection at every turn” — and Brent’s in the San Fernando Valley and nearby Westlake Village — which he calls “absolutely sensational.”