It’s just before the midweek lunch rush at Langer’s Deli and owner Norm Langer is behind the already-busy sandwich counter inspecting a stack of newly sliced rye bread. With him is Jaime Castaneda, a longtime manager, trusted counterman and one of the secret weapons Langer deploys to ensure the deli’s famous pastrami is hand-cut with speed and precision.
“It doesn’t happen without me,” says Langer. “But it also doesn’t happen without him.”
“That’s teamwork,” chimes in Castaneda, who has worked at Langer’s for 43 years. Or 44 years. The two go back and forth on the detail.
“I started working here when I was 3 years old,” Castaneda says with a grin before turning to the hunk of hot pastrami he’s placed on a cutting board. Gripping a knife in one hand and a carving fork in the other, he swiftly slices through the meat, each rosy, pepper-edged piece beautifully aligned with the next like a blackjack dealer’s gracefully fanned deck of cards.
But about that bread. Langer is not pleased.
“It’s all this hot weather,” he says of the recent L.A. heat wave. “You’ve got air-conditioning fans on at the bakery so the air blows on the dough during proofing. It gets a skin on it.”
“Taste it,” he says, handing over a slice. “The flavor’s there. It eats right. It bites right. But see what I mean?” He tears at a slice. “It’s a little bit stretchy. It’s a little bit rough.”
“If I let it go … if I don’t jump up and down, I don’t know what I’m going to get tomorrow.”
Norm Langer rarely lets anything go. Neither did his late father, Al Langer, who in 1947, with his wife, Jean, opened Langer’s Deli on the corner of 7th Street and Alvarado Street in the building that once housed the 12-seat Famous Delly. “With two l’s,” Langer says.
Getting the rye bread just right was an obsession that Norm Langer inherited from his father, who came up with the idea for the restaurant’s now-famous twice-baked rye in 1936 when he briefly ran a deli in Palm Springs.
“There were no bakeries in Palm Springs he approved of,” Langer says of his dad. “So he found one in Boyle Heights called Detroit Bakery, and [had] bread shipped from East L.A. to Palm Springs by Greyhound bus. By the time my dad got it, it was a day old, and what was he going to do to refresh it, to make it something customers would come back for? He perfected this process of rebaking the bread, and then slicing it hot. It’s got an outside crust that’s crispy, and an inside crust that’s very soft, very tender, and very moist. The problem is once you rebake it, you’ve got to use it within an hour or it becomes hard as a rock.”
That refreshed rye bread, which now comes from Fred’s Bakery and Deli, a Beverlywood institution, is one of the key reasons Langer’s pastrami sandwiches have become the standard by which all other pastrami sandwiches are judged.
“Embarrassing to admit,” the late New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton wrote in 2012 when she was looking for a great classic rye, “but the best example of this fragrant bread is at Langer’s Delicatessen in Los Angeles.”
Writer Nora Ephron wasn’t embarrassed when in 2002 she declared in the New Yorker, “The hot pastrami sandwich served at Langer’s Delicatessen in downtown Los Angeles is the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world.”
Of course, it was back in 1991 when this paper’s late restaurant critic Jonathan Gold wrote with a wobbly “probably,” perhaps to soothe New York partisans, “The fact is inescapable: Langer’s probably serves the best pastrami sandwich in America.” (By 2005, he dropped the “probably.”)
What is remarkable is that even with intense economic pressures putting the squeeze on restaurants, Langer’s has not compromised on the quality of its pastrami. The meat, cured at Burbank’s RC Provisions with a proprietary recipe developed by Al Langer, still gets a lengthy — and costly — steaming after it arrives at the restaurant.
“You’ve got to break the tissues down so it becomes fork-tender,” says Norm Langer. “That takes anywhere from two and a half to five hours in live steam.”
In fact, it becomes so fork-tender that the meat can’t be sliced in a machine. You need an expert like Castaneda to hand-slice it.
All that steam time also shrinks “the product,” Langer says,”anywhere from 35 to 38%.” That’s a loss most other restaurants wouldn’t tolerate. But for Langer it’s necessary.
If you only steam the meat for 45 minutes like many other delis, he explains, “you’ve got to cut it on the slicing machine because it’s tough” — like “a racquetball,” his father, Al, told me years ago. “And you have to cut it paper-thin so people will be able to chew it,” Norm says. “But steaming it as long as [we] do, you can bite it, you can chew it, you can enjoy it, you can savor it. That’s what keeps my customers coming back.”
Stubbornly sticking to this process over the years is why the pastrami sandwich that Gold ate in 1991, and throughout his life, isn’t that different from the pastrami sandwich you eat at Langer’s today — whether a plain pastrami on rye with a smear of Gulden’s spicy brown mustard (my preference) or the deli’s most popular sandwich, the No. 19 with coleslaw, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing atop the pastrami. In 2022, when restaurant critic Bill Addison inducted Langer’s into the L.A. Times restaurant Hall of Fame, he declared, “The No. 19should be named the official sandwich of Los Angeles.”
So it only makes sense that Norm Langer and the whole crew of Langer’s Deli should receive this year’s L.A. Times Gold Award, which was established in 2017 to honor those “expanding the notion of what Southern California cooking might be.”
It’s not just the pastrami, however. Over the years, Norm Langer has fought to maintain his classic Jewish deli as a welcoming space for all of Los Angeles, pushing politicians, police and really anyone who will listen to clean up the neighborhood that has suffered for decades as a drug and gang haven. It got so bad that in 2024 he told Times columnist Steve Lopez that he was thinking of closing the deli if the city didn’t clean up the streets, and especially nearby MacArthur Park — described earlier this year by columnist Gustavo Arellano as L.A.’s Norma Desmond. That threat got the attention of Mayor Karen Bass, who met with Langer a few days after the Lopez column and said, “We have to do whatever it’s going to take” to make MacArthur Park as welcoming as Langer’s.
Maybe that was one of the factors behind a June surge in drug arrests by the LAPD and federal agents, as well as a new $40-million lake and park cleanup project.
Langer has seen a lot of these projects come and go, including many that get abandoned after a promising start. But he’s also seen some improvement and has gotten so many customers begging him not to close that late last year he pledged to keep his doors open at least through the L.A.-hosted 2028 Olympics — “and likely beyond.”
We hope that “beyond” goes on for many more years to come.
The presentation of the L.A. Times Gold Award will take place at 8 p.m. during the celebration and tasting of the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles, chosen by restaurant critics Bill Addison and Jenn Harris. Tickets are available at this link.
The post The nation’s best pastrami? Find it at Langer’s Deli, this year’s L.A. Times Gold Award winner appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
