San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Feeding the demand from scratch
Reuben, challah, chopped liver — it’s all tops
Max & Louie’s New York Diner owner Drew Glick is all about supply and demand: He’ll supply a solution wherever and whenever there’s a demand, one way or another.
He’s put that ethos into practice from the day he opened Max & Louie’s in 2016. San Antonio needed a full-service New Yorkstyle deli and cafe, so he supplied one. Then Max & Louie’s needed better challah bread and a bagel more true to its Northeastern roots, so he started baking his own.
Then demand shifted to pizza, so he practiced with his New York-style dough until it had the right backbone for pizza, calzones and stromboli. When the pandemic clenched its fist in 2020, choking off his customer base, Glick was among the first restaurateurs to employ a germzapping robot to sanitize his dining rooms. And he partnered with H-E-B to put Max & Louie’s meatloaf, matzo ball soup, stuffed cabbage, challah French toast and more in grab-and-go cases at the grocery store.
And now, in the middle of ongoing supply chain disruptions, he couldn’t get the chopped liver he needed for sandwiches, so he’s started making his own from scratch.
All that supply and demand adds up to more than economic theory. It adds up to one of the city’s busiest diners and one of its most satisfying deli sandwich experiences.
Best sandwich: The late comedian Mitch Hedberg joked about getting so much meat on a New York deli sandwich that
when the waiter asked if he wanted anything else, he said, “Yeah, a loaf of bread and some other people.”
It’s that way with Max & Louie’s Reuben sandwich ($16.95 with coleslaw), a picture of so much sliced pastrami and corned beef piled so precariously high that the rye bread was hanging on for dear life — and I wouldn’t want it any other way. The picture was made complete by a shower of sauerkraut, a layer of melted Swiss and a schmear of Thousand Island, served with sweet coleslaw and big half-sour pickle as green as polished emerald.
Other sandwiches: Bless that
chopped liver problem Glick was having, because the result was a housemade chicken liver sandwich ($15.95 with coleslaw) that sat on the iron throne of lush minerality, its creamy base punctuated with boiled egg and outfitted with fat slices of red onion, ripe tomatoes and lettuce on rye bread imported from
New York.
Max & Louie’s took me right back to the lunchbox days of egg salad ($11.95 with coleslaw) and tuna salad ($12.95 with coleslaw), two of my all-time favorite sandwich stuffers. Each one was fresh and clean and simple, and each one benefited from a choice of breads that included house-baked challah, as light and airy as angel food cake and almost as sweet. That same challah became custard-bomb French toast slices for a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon that conveyed the heft and flavor of a full diner breakfast ($13.95 with home fries).
And finally, when Glick needed just the right onion roll to re-create a New York roast beef sandwich for his Broadway Deli Dip ($15.95 with coleslaw), he baked his own. It was the right move, because it came out thick and chewy in all the best ways, strong enough to support thinly sliced but still juicy roast beef and melted mozzarella, but soft enough to absorb a dunking in the bowl of beef broth on the side.