LA Weekly's Jonathan Gold: 99 Essential Restaurants

11 November 2010

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.

Click here to read Jonathan's complete review