CARNEGIE DELI
854 7TH AVENUE
NEW YORK, NY 10019
212-757-2245
HOURS: Daily 8:00 AM - 12:00 AM
Eating at the Carnegie Deli has been on my "to do" list during every visit to New York since I first visited the city in 2001 which was years before I started this blog in 2008. This to me is the iconic New York eatery where the sandwiches are as big as some heads and the food is delicious. Upon arriving in the New York we quickly heard rumors that the Carnegie Deli was closing. "no way" I thought Carnegie Deli is Manhattan. I dismissed this nonsense as pure lies until we got to the Deli and found lines down the block. The reason for the long lines you ask? Well, the Carnegie Deli "is" going out of business at the end of this year. How - Why - WTF I thought. This can't be so....Read below to learn the story of why we are losing one of the greatest Deli's in the history of the World. I did join the line and was planted next to a lady who wanted to tell me everything about her vacation to New York. She would not stop talking which probably made the line go faster. Once in it was like being home again. The madness of the tight spaced dining room. The white dresses of the waitresses. The huge sandwiches, pies and cakes were all around me as were other people who we were sat with. The tables were placed right next to each other with no spacing so like it or not you will meet and talk with the people on your right and left. Conversation is light before the food arrives but when the sandwiches hit the table everyone starts talking until they dive in and become silent while they inhale their meats. Wow...if this place ain't the best I don't know what is. First off come the house made Pickles. Two types with one tasting more like a cucumber. They are large so we cut them up trying not to look like a pig. But after a few bites you just want to pick up the entire Pickle and finish it. They are good and hard to stop eating. We went for the Carnegie Famous Reuben ($29.99). This is an open faced sandwich with a huge amount of Pastrami, Swiss Cheese and Sauerkraut served on the best Rye Bread I have ever tasted. Every component of this sandwich is delicious. You can taste everything! The Pastrami is King though. So tender and full of flavor. It does not seem dense and heavy and it goes down like ice cream. Best I have ever tasted for sure! When you get the bread and all of the ingredients in one bite, it is a food orgasm. Perfect symphony of flavors. There were two of us and we could barely knock out half of this mound of food. Made a homeless guys day buy giving him the rest. The other sandwich that is a "must try" here is the Woody Allen ($29.99). A monster stack of Pastrami, Corned Beef with thick slices of Provolone Cheese and what the heck add some Bacon. No trip to Carnegie Deli would not be complete without a small slice of Cheesecake. The Cheesecake here is the best I have ever tasted. Thick and dense with so much flavor. Even the large slices after a sandwich go down easy because it is just that good. Yes I gained 5lbs while in New York but it was worth it to enjoy food like this one last time. I'm gonna miss Carnegie Deli and sure wish they were not closing. Truly an icon in American food history and New York.
Click links below to view more posts on Carnegie Deli;
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| CARNEGIE DELI |
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| WITH THE CARNEGIE DELI CLOSING THE LINES ARE DOWN THE BLOCK |
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| I LEFT SAYING THAT IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT |
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| THE DELI COUNTER AT CARNEGIE DELI |
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| THIS PLACE IS THE SHIT. MY FAVORITE DELI RESTAURANT ON EARTH |
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| CANNOT BELIEVE I WILL NEVER EAT IN THIS GREAT PLACE AGAIN |
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| CARNEGIE DELI MENU |
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| CARNEGIE DELI PICKLES ARE THE BEST! |
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| CARNEGIE FAMOUS REUBEN SANDWICH SERVED OPEN FACED |
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| THE BREAD AND PASTRAMI SHINE HERE BUT EVERYTHING IS DELICIOUS IN THIS SANDWICH |
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| THE WOODY ALLEN |
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| CARNEGIE DELI CHEESECAKE IS THE BEST ON EARTH |
Live in New York long enough and you will lose somewhere you love. Good things die here. It’s what keeps the place alive.
But every now and then a big one goes, as it did on Friday morning, when the owner of the Carnegie Deli suddenly announced that the Manhattan sandwich place would be shutting down at the end of the year.
The famous Jewish restaurant on Seventh Avenue and 55th Street, down the block from Carnegie Hall, has been putting out cardiologically perilous fare since 1937. When it closes its doors on Dec. 31, the city will lose not only an irreplaceably iconic four-inch-tall pastrami sandwich, but also a small piece of itself.
News of the restaurant’s demise emerged at 7 a.m. on Friday when, at a meeting in the dining room, the owner, Marian Harper, told about 25 early-shift employees that she could no longer bear the stressful challenges of restaurant life.
“The restaurant business is one of the hardest jobs in New York City,” Ms. Harper later said in a formal statement issued by her publicist. “At this stage in my life, the early morning to late night days have taken a toll, along with my sleepless nights and grueling hours.”
The shock waves quickly followed. Eater, the culinary website, reported on the closing with a mournful article with the headline: “Pastrami Bombshell.” Twitter was full of photographs of deli meat and melancholy posts: “How’s a Jew like me supposed to suffer a heart attack at age 37 in this city anymore?!” And “It’s pastrami on cry.”
The restaurant had seen its share of turmoil in the last few years. In April 2015, it was closed for almost 10 months by Consolidated Edison, which was investigating its misappropriation of natural gas, an impropriety that the utility said had gone on for six years and resulted in a backdated bill of more than $40,000. One year earlier, Ms. Harper and her husband of 22 years, Sandy Levine, went through a contentious divorce.
According to her spokeswoman, Ms. Harper, 65, would not go quietly into retirement, but rather planned to devote herself — as awful as it sounds — to “licensing the iconic Carnegie Deli brand” by selling a line of wholesale products. Though the flagship restaurant would soon go the way of New York institutions such as Elaine’s and CBGB, satellite Carnegies would remain in operation at Madison Square Garden, the Mirage Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas and the Sands Casino Resort in Bethlehem, Pa., the spokeswoman said.
The somewhat catty truth about the Carnegie Deli is that it is one of those New York destinations that actual New Yorkers visit once or twice and then frequently decide they have had enough of. Its 64 seats are usually filled with tourists. This was proved true by a quick poll of the people standing in line outside the restaurant on Friday afternoon. When asked where they were from, they provided a long list of locations that were not New York: Arkansas, Louisiana, Arizona, San Francisco, Miami, Dallas, Switzerland.
“We came up on a bus trip from Baltimore, and I read the place was shutting down on my iPhone,” said Ruthann Smith, a 69-year-old retired high school teacher who was enjoying the pastrami with her husband, Dennis, a former financier. “We were trying to figure out where to go for lunch and I said, ‘We better go to the Carnegie Deli while we still have a chance.’”
With its linoleum floors and animal protein odors, the Carnegie Deli was never fine dining, but the seedy lighting and eclectic checkerboard of celebrity photos (from the quarterback Y. A. Tittle to the Fonz, Henry Winkler) gave the place a homey sort of drop-ceiling charm.
“I served Denzel Washington and James Brown and Bill Clinton,” said Desmarine Redwood, who has worked there as a waitress for 26 years. “It gave me peace of mind. I loved working at this place. I’m going to miss it.”
Once the deli closes, devotees of the kosher-style sandwich will begin their hunt for other options — perhaps like the one at Katz’s on the Lower East Side. That, at least, was a possibility for Otis Allen, a credit manager and one of the few New Yorkers having lunch at the Carnegie on Friday.
“I’ll miss the place — I’ve been coming here for years,” Mr. Allen said. “I haven’t figured out yet where my next place will be.”
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