Pastrami on rye: what it is, how to order it, what to avoid

Overview

Pastrami on rye is a hot sandwich: a fist-thick pile of warm, hand-carved, spice-crusted beef between two thin slices of seeded rye bread, with yellow or brown mustard and nothing else. The meat is the labour of a week or more. Beef — traditionally the fatty navel, the belly cut, though many delis now use brisket — is cured in brine much like corned beef, then coated in a black rub of cracked pepper, coriander and garlic, smoked, and finally steamed for hours until a fork gives it no resistance. That is why a good slice looks dark at the edge, rosy in the middle, and falls apart with a fringe of soft fat.

It is a dish of the Jewish delicatessen, and the deli is the point. Pastrami’s roots run back through Romanian and Turkish cured beef — the word itself is Romanian, from a Turkish ancestor — and Ashkenazi immigrants brought it to the city in the 1880s. What the city made was the delicatessen sandwich: the cured beef of the old country, carved hot to order and stacked absurdly high on rye, in a kosher-style dining room. The often-told story that it began with one immigrant butcher who took a recipe in trade around 1887 is charming and thinly documented; enjoy it as a founding legend rather than a fact.

Pastrami on rye is native to the city in the way that matters: the cure came from elsewhere, but the hot hand-carved sandwich, and the whole ritual around it, were built here.

What to order

The order is short and worth saying correctly: “pastrami on rye, mustard.” That is the whole classic, and every part of it is load-bearing.

• Rye, not anything else. Seeded rye — flecked with caraway — is the bread the sandwich was designed around. It is dense enough to hold half a pound of wet meat without collapsing, which soft white bread cannot do.
• Mustard, and only mustard. Yellow or a sharper deli brown. This is the one place a request marks you out: no mayonnaise, no cheese, no lettuce or tomato on the classic. A kosher-style deli keeps meat and dairy apart, so cheese on hot pastrami is not a preference, it is a wrong note.
• Fatty over lean. If the counter offers you the choice, take the fattier cut. “Lean” sounds like the healthier order and gives you the drier, tougher one; the fat from the navel is what the week of work was for.

Two named relatives are worth telling apart. Corned beef is the same brined brisket without the smoke and pepper crust — pinker, milder, boiled rather than smoked; delis carry both and they are not the same sandwich. The Reuben is a hot, griddled thing — meat with sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing on grilled rye — and it is traditionally built on corned beef, not pastrami; ordering a pastrami Reuben is legitimate but it is a different, richer dish, and it abandons the mustard-only austerity that makes the plain sandwich what it is. A whole pickle, usually a garlicky half-sour, comes on the side and is part of the plate, not an extra.

What to avoid

The single most useful test is temperature and origin at the knife. Real pastrami on rye is warm and carved to order; when the sandwich is opened it should give off steam. What you are avoiding is cold, pre-sliced pastrami — the thin, uniform, machine-shaved slices sold from a refrigerated case or layered cold onto bread. That is a deli-meat product wearing the name, and it is a different food from the hot, hand-cut kind.

Watch how it is cut. The prized version is carved by hand off a hot hunk, which yields thick, slightly irregular slices with texture. A perfectly even, translucent, machine-shaved stack is the industrial shortcut, and it eats dry.

Be wary of the sandwich sold cheap and fast where the crowd is tourists rather than deli regulars — near the big sights and the theatre district — often with the word “deli” doing heavy lifting over a menu of everything. The genuine article is a specialist’s object; a place that makes pastrami properly tends to make a short list of things and to have been making them for a long time. And a supermarket packet labelled pastrami, for a home sandwich, is again the cold product — fine for what it is, not the thing this article is about.

Practicalities

The first shock is the bill. A pastrami on rye at a proper deli now runs roughly $20 to $30 — for a sandwich — and that is not the neighbourhood talking. The price is the meat: half a pound or more of beef that took a week to cure, smoke and steam, carved by hand. A number far below that usually signals the cold, machine-sliced version rather than a bargain.

Because it is so large, the honest move is often to share one. Many delis expect it and will split a sandwich in the kitchen, sometimes for a small plate charge that is clearly worth it; one sandwich, a shared pickle and two drinks feeds two people well. The traditional drink alongside is a celery-flavoured soda or an egg cream — a fizzy chocolate-milk drink that contains neither egg nor cream.

Tipping is where this differs from a slice counter but agrees with the city guide: a sit-down deli is table service, so the standard round twenty per cent applies, and the tax-doubling shortcut works on the bill as anywhere else. At the busiest old rooms you may be handed a ticket on the way in that your orders are marked on and paid at the door — hold on to it, because losing it is a genuine and expensive nuisance. Cards are fine; the queue at peak lunch is the real cost, and going mid-afternoon buys you the same sandwich in a calm room.