A new wave of pastrami portions
Icame, they sliced, I ate pastrami. Over the past month, I ate it hand-sliced by an octogenarian at a refurbished New Yorkstyle deli in Hialeah that’s been around since 1954, and house-smoked at a hard-to-find artisanal deli in Miami that closed this week after four months. I ate it in Fort Lauderdale at a growing deli chain whose packaged meat from an upstate New York purveyor contains “caramel color and smoke flavor added,” and at an Aventura kosher deli where the counterman sliced it incorrectly — with the grain instead of against — leading to a $16 sandwich that chewed like bubble gum.
Finally, I ate pastrami in Boca Raton at one of the rare places that makes its own product from start to finish — a nine-day process of brining, rubbing, smoking, resting, warming and hand-carving its meat into fat-streaked, pepper-andcoriander crusted, ruby-red piles. It is a time- and labor-consuming process that has become a lost art. Somehow it seemed fitting that this pastrami came not from kosher navel at a Jewish deli, but rather from Angus brisket at a Texas-style barbecue joint, Smoke BBQ.
Delicatessen culture has had its ups and downs in South Florida, mostly down in recent years. But New York-style delis are mounting a comeback. The TooJay’s chain is in growth mode, recently opening locations in Fort Lauderdale (May) and Dania Beach (this week). Onion
Roll, a longtime Detroitarea deli that closed earlier this decade, will soon be reborn in Broward, scheduled to open in Sea Ranch Lakes later this year. And Stephen’s Deli, a Hialeah fixture since 1954, reopened in June under new ownership after an 18-month hiatus.
“Delis have been trending,” says Max Piet, the CEO and president of TooJay’s, which started in 1981 in Palm Beach and now has 30 Florida locations, 10 in Palm Beach County and six in Broward.
My recent tour led me to a double-edged conclusion: As a Brooklyn native who once worked in a kosher deli near Boston, I’m glad to see a pulse in deli culture. But, oy vey, some of the things I saw and tasted would, as they say in Yiddish, make my bubbes plotz (grandmothers collapse). Some notes from the field …
Stephen’s Deli, Hialeah
The place was packed. Henderson “Junior” Biggers, 83 years young, was perched in his corner, hand-carving corned beef and pastrami for the lunchtime crowd, same as he’s been doing for five decades. I slurped on some matzo ball soup, the chicken broth nourishing and the matzo balls light but not as fluffy as my grandmother’s. Then came an only-in-South Florida moment both dismaying and TooJay’s dessert platter, with rugelach and black-and-white cookies, at an opening party for the newest TooJay’s location in Dania Beach.