LA Weekly’s Jonathan Gold: 99 Essential Restaurants
Langer’s Delicatessen-Restaurant is proud to be a part of the LA Weekly’s latest 99 Essential Restaurants list authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic (and friend of Langer’s) Jonathan Gold.
Langer’s has finally become the institution it deserved to be all along: patronized by big shots, home to a radio show, beloved by the national food press, occupying a corner renamed Langer’s Square. It has become common knowledge that the late Al Langer was among the last of the great deli men, a guy who traced the contours of a properly steamed pastrami the way a great sushi chef does a fresh yellowtail….
…Bite into a Langer’s pastrami sandwich: thick slices of hand-sliced beef, glistening with peppery fat, as dense and as smoky as Texas barbecue; thick-cut seeded corn rye, hot, crisp-crusted and soft inside, with a slightly sour tang that helps tame the richness of the meat; a dab of yellow mustard as important to the whole as a sushi master’s wasabi. The fact is inescapable: Langer’s serves the best pastrami sandwich in America.
We are honored and humbled, Jonathan. The entire Langer family thanks you from the bottom of our collective heart.
