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  “Do you want my ticket?” the customer asked.

  I realized then that I had no idea how much any of this cost.

  “Umm hey,” I asked the counterman on my left, “how much for pastrami?”

  “Thirteen forty-five.”

  “Do I just write that on the ticket?” I asked again. “Is there a code or something?”

  “Yeah, man, just write it on,” he replied. “Jeez.”

  I put the ticket on the cutting board, where it quickly soaked up all the meat’s grease and became transparent. I scrawled as best I could and left the cashier to figure it out. Customer No. 1 just walked away dazed. One sandwich down and I was already exhausted, dejected, and in way over my head.

  9:00 P.M.: The Steady Hours

  Each sandwich I made was progressively better. I cut more quickly and more evenly, chopping and stacking the meat in one clean motion. The cutter to my left, Freddo, gave me tips as I went along:

  —Don’t scrape the board with the edge of the knife. It dulls the blade.

  —Cut leaner meat from the tip and fatter from the back.

  —If you don’t have a lineup, put the meat back into the steam box so it stays moist.

  —Dig the pastramis out from the bottom of the steam box. Those have been steaming the longest.

  Though Katz’s pastrami is smoked by an outside purveyor, it is dry cured. This gives Katz’s pastrami its signature dark red color and also a less salty flavor, which many claim is the finest in New York, if not anywhere. A traditionally made product has its nuances. Like snowflakes (if snow came from cattle), no two pastramis are exactly alike. Sometimes the flesh would be buttery soft, with very few sinews to impede my carving, but often I’d cut into one that was tough and fibrous, and I’d find myself battling through a maze of tissue. Pros would call this “butchering,” which a growing pile of wasted scraps attested to. Whenever I hit a tough piece, Freddo did his best to teach me how to carve it properly, slicing along the fatty center of the pastrami, a highway of sorts, until it split in two, and then watching as he trimmed the “shit” out—those thin, tough, yellow membranes that ruin a sandwich. I soon learned to admit a sort of failure. If a pastrami was too tough, I’d bring it back to the steam box to tenderize longer and get another. This is the same way experienced Katz’s customers order their sandwiches.

  “The pastrami is unmatched at Katz’s,” famed defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz told me. Raised on kosher delis in Brooklyn, Dershowitz has his Katz’s ordering down to a science. “You have to stand in front of the counterman with three or four dollars in your hand, and you have to taste three or four different pastramis before you accept one. It’s like a wine in France. It’s either too lean or too fat. I remember when I was trying to be healthy once, I ordered a lean pastrami at Katz’s and it was a disaster. It was inedible, and we had to order one that was more marbled. We realized the idea is not to have less fat pastrami, but to have less fat pastrami.”

  The crowd arrived in waves. Everything would be quiet for twenty minutes, and then they’d appear in front of me, holding out tickets and barking orders like Wall Street traders. For half an hour I’d work in a daze until the lineup just disappeared and I could take a moment to wipe my board down, regroup, and talk with the other cutters.

  A nineteen-year-old Dominican-born counterman who had started at Katz’s three years before, Freddo’s real name was Alfredo Fernandez. He certainly looked older, with a pencil-thin beard and compact frame, but his impish grin, and the fact that he occupied the far end of the counter, betrayed his youth. Like Freddo, most of the countermen at Katz’s are either Dominican or Puerto Rican. The night shift is largely in the hands of the younger generation. Charlie, the night manager, who was in his late twenties, had started at Katz’s in his teens, but studied hospitality in college, and was now high up in the deli’s management. Though he worked some days, it was the late shift that Charlie loved most. “In the day you got a lot more older people and a lot more orders to go,” he said. Lunch lineups can snake out the door, which is astounding considering the place can seat up to 355 diners. If a tour bus happens to disgorge its passengers, up to a dozen cutters will face lineups seven-deep.

  Nights were also when the cutters let loose, teasing each other constantly. The narrow space between the counters became a gauntlet of doom, as hip checks and arm grapples met brazen countermen who dared walk into another man’s space. At one point, Beni, one of the most senior cutters, grabbed me by the arm and started twisting, taunting me in Spanish, calling me a pussy, slowly jabbing his carving fork into my side. I froze. Beni then looked up and realized he had the wrong guy. “Hey, sorry, I thought you were someone else,” he said, patting me on the back, “but now you’re one of us, okay?”

  During the night shift, the walnut-skinned Beni (whose full name is Bienvenido Quiros) was the alpha-cutter, occupying the far end of the line, right down by the window. Katz’s was Beni’s latest (and he hoped last) home in a life of New York delis. When he came over from Puerto Rico in the 1960s, he began working as a butcher at Cookie’s, in Long Island. From there his résumé reads straight from the obituary pages of New York Jewish delicatessens: 1st Jewish Deli, 6th Avenue Deli, Broadway Deli, Wolf’s Deli. Beni learned to hand-cut meat at the legendary Lou G. Siegel, where they called him “Beni the Surgeon.” He then went on to stints at the Stage Deli, Carnegie Deli, Sarge’s Deli, and the legendary Schmulka Bernstein’s on Essex. Finally, he wound up at Katz’s. “This is the best deli by far,” Beni said, effortlessly disassembling a corned beef. “The merchandise is so good because when you slice by hand the juice stays in the meat. With a machine, it draws the flavor out.” Beni was best known for asking whether customers wanted their pastrami “lean and mean” or “juicy like Lucy.”

  Of seventy-three employees, only a handful were Jewish, including Austin, Dell, head chef Kenny Kohn, and a Ukrainian-born cutter named Pyotr Okmyansky, known simply as Peter, the oldest, and last, Jewish counterman at Katz’s. Peter was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1933, as Stalin’s famine was ending. He learned a little Yiddish from his mother, though the food served at Katz’s was not something he ate back home. By the late 1970s, Peter was working part-time as a mechanic and played professional trombone in the national music conservatory. When his mother got the chance to come to the United States, Peter went with her, followed a year later by his wife and daughter. They moved to Brooklyn, where Peter worked at a gas station, and in 1985 a friend offered him a job at Katz’s. Because the counterman’s position came with medical insurance, he took it.

  Most of the cutters back then were Soviet Jews, who in just four days taught Peter the art of carving a sandwich. After years working in the Soviet system, he fell in love with the job. Aside from putting his daughter through medical school, it afforded Peter unthinkable opportunities. He has served debutantes and movie stars, as well as President Clinton. “He come to counter, yes, Clinton, big man, he like a lot to eat,” Peter recalled. “He order two or three hot dogs, pastrami sandwich, and something else.”

  As we spoke in the back of the deli, Peter rubbed his thick, calloused hands together. His full mane of white hair was hidden underneath the black Katz’s baseball cap he always wore (most of the countermen wore paper hats). “I feel I can work steady here,” Peter said. “Nobody can push you here, business is really business, you understand?” Physically, age didn’t seem to be a factor, though co-workers often complained of Peter’s moodiness and an obsessive need to organize the cutting stations. He boasted that he could sharpen fifteen knives a night, including all those at the start of his shift and the shift after him. It was a duty he took on because he felt he did it better than anyone. “I can’t stay home. I feel sick, I feel tired. Here [Katz’s] give me more physical energy,” he said, flexing his biceps. “I feel more young working here.”

  12:00 A.M.: Prime Time

  Somewhere after the twentieth pastrami sandwich, I somehow forgot that I was researching a book. Custome
rs approached me and I was no longer nervous. “What are ya havin,’ honey?” I’d say, or “What can I get you, bud?” I’d jostle and joke with the ladies—“Take a taste of this, sweetheart, I made it myself”—and I’d bust the chops of the lads—“C’mon, big guy, you don’t think you can handle the club roll?”

  The highlight of my night came when a tourist turned to his wife and said, “Guys like him have been here for decades. They’re the real New York Deli Men. Hey buddy,” he asked me, “how long you been working here?”

  “Four hours,” I answered.

  He burst into laughter. “See, honey? He even has that famous Katz’s sarcasm.”

  Still, anything other than a straight-up pastrami, corned beef, or turkey sandwich was a curve ball. Reubens, which were very popular, required a series of steps that involved slicing the corned beef, placing it onto a plate, microwaving Swiss cheese onto the meat, sliding it neatly onto bread, slathering on Russian dressing, and closing it with as little mess as possible. Mine looked like they’d been dropped off buildings. Likewise, the damn rubber gloves, prescribed by the health department, cause the hands to sweat, and they didn’t fit properly. Each time I tried to wrap a takeout order, I’d catch a fingertip under a fold of paper and wrap half a glove up with the customer’s sandwich.

  The big Saturday night rush started trickling in after midnight, when bar hoppers migrated from the funky lounges of the East Village to the Lower East Side to end their evenings in innumerable basement bars and clubs. My lineup expanded seven-deep, and I served the following characters over the course of the next few hours:

  —A Russian mobster with appropriately leopard-print-clad, large-breasted, bottle-blond companion. She wanted: “Meat. No bread, just meat. To go.” He tipped twenty dollars.

  —A nebbish Jewish man with his black fiancé. “She’s converting for me,” he said with a beaming smile, “so I brought her here.” Brisket on rye.

  —A guy from Boston who ordered his pastrami on white with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. I subtly recommended it on rye with mustard. He preferred his way. I restrained myself from slashing his throat.

  —A coked-out blond model with her two gay friends, all in skinny jeans. “Hey honey,” she said, glassy-eyed, “oh you’re so cute, mmmmm I want a meat sandwich, honey, hahahaha, I want tongue with potato salad and cream cheese.”

  —A pair of six-foot-plus, thick-as-trees, combat-boot-wearing bikers in bomber jackets. They looked like skinheads crossbred with Hells Angels. “One pastrami, please, and one Reuben.” Polite and genteel as Queen Elizabeth.

  In addition to this there were Mexican tourists, wealthy debutantes, the Bridge and Tunnel club crowd, sarcastic cops, bleary-eyed immigrant workers, Upper East Side preppies, and a few hardscrabble East Village Jews. In short, it was a cross-section of anything the streets of New York could throw my way.

  “I use the term organic to describe this place,” said Fred Austin, “not to mean we serve organic products, but in the sense that it’s alive. For many years Katz’s was essentially a community room for the neighborhood.” But as million-dollar condominium suites replaced the co-ops where Austin had grown up, where was that neighborhood heading and, with it, Katz’s deli? Real estate values had risen 1600 per cent since Austin had taken over. “If I had to pay rent here, it would be fifty to sixty thousand dollars a month,” he said. “[People] complain about the price of a pastrami sandwich now, but I’d have to charge forty dollars with those costs.”

  Part of him may have been nostalgic for the Lower East Side of yore, but Austin knew better than to stand in the way of progress. “Manhattan is exciting and electric and hard because things keep changing. Our original architecture and decor is here and I don’t want it all replaced with steel and concrete, but I’d hate for someone to come along and say ‘You can’t paint here without a permit.’”

  Offers to purchase Katz’s Delicatessen come to Austin and Dell almost weekly, reportedly as high as $21 million. “Not that Katz’s is a charity or social welfare experiment in any extent, but I’ve got seventy-five families who depend on Katz’s and thousands of people who come here daily for fun and food,” Austin said. “I have so much fun here I would not want it to change in my lifetime. It’s very tempting to get that type of money, but what would I do with it? Buy another deli?”

  Was he saying he’d never sell?

  “Well, ‘never’ is a long time,” he replied. “It’s my goal not to sell. I can’t imagine the circumstances where I would need to sell. If it’s worth $5 million today it’ll be worth $10 million tomorrow.”

  This was in November 2006. Three months later, I began to hear rumors from others in the delicatessen business that Katz’s was quietly being put up for sale. Their asking price was supposedly north of $30 million with rumors flying as high as $50 million. Though they denied the rumors at every opportunity, Alan Dell later admitted to me that they were trying to figure out a way for developers to build on top of the deli, without having to close it down. Though the recession killed that plan by late 2008, most in the deli business, and in New York, agree that some transaction for Katz’s is only a matter of time.

  “It seems against human nature for anybody to resist the millions of dollars co-owners Fred Austin and Alan Dell are certainly being offered,” New York Magazine’s Grub Street blog wrote. “Other men have sold atomic secrets for less.”

  2:15 A.M.: Last Call.

  “TAKEOUUUT!” Charlie hollered at the top of his lungs, eliciting a unified chorus of “TAKEOUUUUUUUT!” along the counter.

  The cleanup crew immediately started stacking chairs and clearing plates. The countermen on my end closed up shop. I looked down at the floor and beheld a trash mountain pooled around my ankles: torn hunks of bread, little bits of fat and gristle, the ripped white paper that held rye loaves, splotches of mustard and Russian dressing, rubber gloves galore, and a thick bed of sawdust. My shoes were coated so densely with peppercorns that I could have tossed them into the steam box and sliced them into sandwiches. My pants were stained transparent with grease. Every inch of me emanated pastrami musk. I handed Charlie back my apron. It was the greatest night of my life.

  From Pushcarts to $15 Sandwiches: A Nosh of New York Deli History

  The air is thick with the warm vapor of boiling chickens. A gentle clamor fills the ears; the clang of cutlery, a few gulps of liquid, the sizzle of fat on a hot surface. Conversation—loud, passionate Yiddish punctuated by a marionette’s thrust of hands and fingers—fills the foreground. It is interrupted by loud vocalizations of a meal: the pleasantly high-pitched ahhhhh, uttered in surprise when the food arrives; deep inhalations, as shallow bowls of golden chicken soup with matzo balls are brought under the nose; a cacophony of crunching and slurping and sucking and lip smacking as a platter of stewed chicken fricassee is passionately devoured; the barely audible squish as hot, thin slices of garlicky tongue are pressed by teeth into an onion bun.

  When done, the diners—who are all large bearded men dressed in skullcaps, long coats of thick black wool, and stained white button-down shirts—fold their hands atop formidable bellies, lean back in their chairs, and recite Birkat Hamazon, the traditional grace uttered after meals. They rise to pay the son of the owner, a man in his late twenties with wire-rimmed glasses and a reddish beard. When his father, a stern man whose life knew only hardship before coming to America, is in the deli, there are rules to be followed, but he has retired early tonight, so the shy son can kibitz a bit with the customers. Having paid, the men will don their elaborate black fur hats and walk into the encroaching darkness, destined for synagogue.

  Though the scene could have been plucked from the turn of the century, when New York’s delicatessens were the gathering place for the men of the city’s vast Jewish community, the above took place one November evening in 2006, at a family-owned delicatessen called Gottlieb’s in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Set on the most prominent corner of the Satmar Hasidic community (the most insular and s
trictly Orthodox of Brooklyn’s religious Jewish communities), Gottlieb’s is one of the few places in New York where you can experience the feel of a deli as it was more than a century ago. Inside, Yiddish is the lingua franca. English, spoken only to non-Jewish goyim (including modern Jews such as myself), is pronounced with a thick accent.

  Gottlieb’s hums along in the same way that it has since the day it opened in 1962. Menashe Gottlieb, like his father, Joseph, and grandfather Shloime Zalke, stands behind the counter with cousins and employees, all male, all Jewish, all bearded and with curly peyos of varying lengths dangling from their temples.

  “Ve don’t vant to change it all de vay around,” Menashe Gottlieb told me. “People like de old style, especially dese days.”

  First off, let’s get one thing straight. New York City did not invent the Jewish delicatessen.

  Wait. . . . Stop. . . . Put the gun down.

  It’s true.

  The word delicatessen is a mix of French and German, vaguely meaning “delicious things to eat” or “delicacies.” The foods that we associate today with “Jewish deli” or “New York deli” are the culinary legacy of the Ashkenazi Jews, a population that lived in, and was kicked out of, seemingly every corner of Europe over the course of the past millennium and a half. When the Romans exiled the Jewish people from the land of Israel in 70 ce, the exiles spent much of the next few centuries bouncing around the Mediterranean. After the French king Charlemagne granted Jews rights around 800, many began moving to Europe, with large numbers settling in present-day Germany. The word Ashkenaz meant Germany in medieval Hebrew, a language that soon mixed with German to form Yiddish (literally “Jew-ish”), still heard in places like Gottlieb’s.

  Ashkenazi Jews ate by the dietary guidelines laid out in the biblical kosher laws, principally the avoidance of pork, which was a staple of the European diet, and the mixture of meat and dairy. Anything deemed unkosher, from shellfish to meat not killed and butchered according to kosher laws, is labeled treyf. When the Jews arrived in a new territory, they took a look at the local food and improvised. In Poland, the pig’s blood and buckwheat breakfast sausage called kishka, was adapted by Jews, who substituted beef intestines, chicken fat, and matzo meal. The German medieval practice of pickling meat to preserve it gave way to pickled tongue and corned beef. Almost every single dish we know as Jewish, with the possible exception of bagels, matzo, and gefilte fish, can be traced back to another country’s table.