Last orders at scandalous New York deli
It was a cold, drizzly morning in midtown Manhattan as a hundred people in coats and scarves huddled in a line on the pavement outside the Carnegie Deli. The restaurant was an institution: famous, old, and so full of character that Woody Allen gave it a part in his 1984 film Broadway Danny Rose.
Its speciality was bulging pastrami sandwiches that stretched across a plate like a meaty accordion. ‘‘It’s the last chance,’’ said the man at the front of the queue, who had come in from an affluent suburb north of the city.
The delicatessen, located just off Broadway, would have been 80 years old next week. It closed its doors for the final time yesterday, and people wanted to get in before it was too late.
‘‘You pay US$29 for a sandwich,’’ said Bob Zavicki, 54, a tall, bearded artist waiting about 60 places further back. ‘‘I have had better food. Any steak is better than this.’’
But the sandwiches come with a scintillating story of love and betrayal to match the stuff they serve up in the theatres around Broadway.
‘‘This is one of the last of the original Jewish delis,’’ Zavicki said.
It opened in 1937 and was bought, four decades later, by a New Yorker named Milton Parker. His daughter, Marian, fell in love with Sandy Levine, a salesman who worked in the city’s garment district. They married, and Levine was installed as manager of the deli in 2002.
‘‘He made business cards for himself with a monogram in the middle of the card that said, ‘MBD’,’’ Zavicki recalled. ‘‘It meant, ‘Married Boss’s Daughter’.’’
The deli had a Thai waitress named Penkae Siricharoen who became friends with the Levines. She visited their place in the Hamptons, and they took a holiday with her to Thailand, but Marian Levine later filed lawsuits alleging, among many other things, that Siricharoen had been conducting an affair with her husband.
‘‘Everybody knew about this open secret but moi,’’ Marian Levine, now Marian Harper, said.
She accused her husband and his alleged mistress of conspiring to embezzle US$10 million – noting that Siricharoen had found funds to open her own Thai restaurant in Queens, and to buy a house there.
She also accused her husband of taking some of Siricharoen’s relatives on a tour of the Carnegie Deli’s plant in New Jersey to see how the pastrami was smoked and how the cheesecake was baked, alleging that the relatives used this information to open a very similar deli in Bangkok. ‘‘First she stole her man, then she took the cheesecake recipe!’’ the New York Post proclaimed.
The lawsuits were settled without a trial last year, but in the meantime the deli was forced to close after the city discovered that it was secretly siphoning off gas from the city’s grid to lower its bills. A judge declared Sandy Levine responsible, in rather flamboyant language, calling him a ‘‘shyster of smoked meat’’.
It was able to reopen in February but Harper, 65, concluded that enough was enough. ‘‘All good things must come to an end,’’ she said this month.
Before it closed, Allen came in, for old times’ sake, along with a host of other nostalgic New Yorkers.