Celebrating a Great L.A. Deli: Langer's!
SoCal dining institution marks its 75th anniversary--and a look back at its 50th
The other day we stopped for lunch at Langer’s, a legendary Los Angeles Jewish deli, and discovered that a 75th birthday celebration was just a few days away. In fact, to mark the occasion, there’s a special half-off your check today—Saturday—only. Don’t miss it if you just happen to be at 7th and Alvarado in L.A.!
How time flies! Twenty-five years ago I was working for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, where I had the privilege of interviewing Al and Jean Langer on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of their namesake delicatessen.
I’ve reprinted the article below, minus the original pictures I shot of the couple, which sadly were not included in the digital edition. But first, a few thoughts about Langer’s.
Beyond the prices (hot pastrami on rye was $7.50 then; now it’s priced at $22) and ownership (son Norm is in charge these days) and a flat-screen TV touting the menu items, Langer’s looks and feels the same.
The interior is still flush with period tan naugahyde booths, with vintage lighting fixtures and brown, orange and yellow “deli-inspired” decor. The food is as delicious as ever.
But it’s the pastrami sandwiches that draw the most raves and return visits. When you do a Google search for Langer Deli, the top entry reads: “Langer’s Delicatessen-Restaurant: World’s Best Pastrami.” And for good reason.
The combination of the warm double-baked rye bread (basically, a fresh caraway rye made crustier with another turn in the oven), and the deli’s steamed, hand-sliced pastrami, is rave-worthy.
What makes the pastrami so unlike most others, as Norm Langer explained to Nora Ephron, who wrote about it in a 2002 New Yorker article, is that it’s steamed for three hours until it’s falling apart, then hand-sliced and piled on in perfect proportion to the bread.
“The resulting sandwich, slathered with Gulden’s mustard, is an exquisite combination of textures and taste,” Ephron wrote. “It’s soft but crispy, tender but chewy, peppery but sour, smoky but tangy. It’s a symphony orchestra, different instruments brought together to play one perfect chord. It costs eight-fifty and is, in short, a work of art.”
Today, Saturday, between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., the deli’s most famous sandwich, the #19—hot pastrami with cole slaw, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing on double-baked rye—will be priced at $12, reduced from $24. In my humble opinion, even if you miss the half-priced deal, it’s still worth the price to enjoy that symphony of flavors that plays so perfectly on the tongue.
With that in mind, let’s step into the time machine and travel back to 1997. Here’s what I wrote then. And there’s a bonus: my husband Jefferson Graham’s present-day video tribute to Langer’s, set to a klezmer trio played in our living room! Be sure to click on the link!
“Amid a blizzard of Spanish-language signs for passport photos, discount shoes and wedding gowns, Langer’s Delicatessen & Restaurant sits proudly at the corner of Alvarado and 7th streets, the location it has occupied for the past 50 years. The hours are shorter — 8 to 4, Monday through Saturday, closed Sundays — and the price for a pastrami on rye is certainly higher — $7.50, versus a quarter in 1947. The conversation emanating from the brown naugahyde booths is as often in Spanish as in English. And the Ramparts police substation across the street keeps a close watch on the multiethnic parade of humanity that mills about the busy intersection, once the hub of a lively Jewish neighborhood, second only to Boyle Heights.
The restaurant’s founders, Al and Jean Langer, 84 and 82, respectively, and their son, Norm, 52, who runs the place (with a constant pipeline of advice from his parents), don’t plan on closing up shop any time soon. In fact, they are celebrating the deli’s 50th anniversary — officially last Tuesday, June 17 — with a month-long contest, culminating in a drawing for $7,000 in cash and other prizes on July 1. In Los Angeles, “there aren’t a lot of restaurants and institutions that have survived that long and still have their doors open,” Norm said.
The opening of the Red Line in 1993 was a lifesaver. For a token round-trip tab of 50 cents, the subway line’s last stop was across the street from MacArthur Park, just a few steps from Langer’s. “We were almost ready to close,” Jean said. But the media blitz surrounding the MTA line helped entice crowds similar to those in the restaurant’s heyday, in the ’60s and ’70s. (In those days, Philharmonic- and theatergoers and the bar crowd kept the place hopping until the wee hours.)
The Red Line’s steep price hike to $2.70 round trip has been a bit prohibitive, the Langers said, and the bad press about crime in the area a few years back didn’t help. “In 50 years, we’ve had some broken windows, but no holdups and robberies,” Al said. The police have solved, or at least lessened, the crime problems tremendously, added Norm. “I’m not saying it’s Beverly Hills, but it’s been fantastic,” he said.
During a typical lunch hour, Langer’s bustles with activity. The booths fill with downtown lawyers and businessmen in suits and ties, as well as with more casually dressed residents of the nearby low-income apartments.
One morning before the rush begins in earnest, the Langers take some time to reminisce about their first 50 years. Actually, Al Langer begins his tale several decades before opening day, when he was a 12-year-old kid in Newark, N.J. To earn some money for his bar mitzvah, he went to work in a local delicatessen, later honing his talents in the Catskills and picking up an indispensable sandwich-making skill that he passed on to Norm.
“I don’t know how to make a bowl of soup,” says Al, spry and fit-looking in a salmon-colored polo shirt and dark pants and, obviously, still proud to call himself “a deli man.” “But I can handle a knife. You can’t be taught that.”
In Los Angeles, where he moved to in 1937, Langer went to work at Lax’s, a deli on Hollywood Boulevard, where he met Jean. A Chicago native, she had come out to Los Angeles a married woman and was working as a waitress at Lax’s. “For a Jewish girl, to be a waitress in those days was a shonda [a shame],” she said. “I told everyone I was working as a cashier.”
After Jean was widowed, she and Al were married on April 20, 1941. Two children, Norm in 1944 and Laurie in 1951, followed.
Following his discharge from the Army in 1943, Al borrowed $500 and opened a deli on 8th Street. Within two years, he walked away with $31,000 and invested it in English ceramic teapots. He lost all except $3,000, which he wisely put back in the deli business. He bought an 18-foot-long restaurant with three windows, at the corner of Alvarado and 7th. It had three booths, two tables and a counter — 35 seats altogether. Jean handled cooking and the books, and Al took care of the rest.
“He said to me, ‘The kitchen is yours,'” Jean said. “I said, ‘You meshugenah! I’ve never cooked for anyone but you.’ He said, ‘You’ll learn.'”
Langer’s took over a liquor store, then a Crocker Citizens Bank, expanding to 140 seats by 1967. It had 50 employees on the payroll and stayed open until 3 in the morning on weekends, 1 a.m. during the week. Over the years, numbers of local and national celebrities and politicos have passed through the glass double doors: George Segal, Jack Lord, Buddy Hackett, Mayor Richard Riordan, Zev Yaroslavsky, Jackie Goldberg and Gil Garcetti have all been there. Shecky Greene used to come in. And somewhere in a scrapbook, Norm has a picture of his 5-foot-5 father standing next to the towering basketball great Wilt Chamberlain.
Langer’s also used to cater weddings, Christmas parties, brises and other events. They still do funerals and parties for long-time clients, but not much else in the special-events department.
Norm, who began working at Langer’s at age 17, remembers riding the swan boats at MacArthur Park, going to the movies next door and bowling down the street. Jean would take time out to sunbathe in the park. “I wouldn’t set foot in there today,” she said.
Still, Langer’s is hanging in there. It was featured last week on KABC Talkradio, Fox TV, KTLA and in the Los Angeles Times in honor of its 50th. Neither Norm’s two grown children nor his sister’s two, pictured as tykes in photos hanging on the deli walls, are likely to go into the family business. But Norm isn’t planning on leaving any time soon. And even though his parents don’t work at the restaurant on a daily basis anymore, their son doesn’t do anything without consulting them, and vice versa. That “100-percent communication” and respect has been the secret of survival for Langer’s, Norm said. That, and the food, of course, which earned Zagat’s rating as the No. 1 deli for seven consecutive years, including one rave review that said the pastrami “was worth risking your life over.”
Well, worth a visit to Langer’s Deli anyway.
Thanks for checking out the latest edition of RuthTalksFood. Happy Father’s Day and, as summer officially arrives on Tuesday, Happy Summer Solstice too! Time for warm-weather fruits, road trips, barbecues—and pickles. We’re in love with all of these. Our visit to Langer’s inspired me to make a few pickles and fruit-forward desserts and prepare to hit the road again. I’ll talk about it all soon, so be sure to check back for that.
Always happy for your comments, likes, shares—and subscriptions, of course!
See you next time.
How wonderful for this long running business to have remained in the family. It doesn't happen very often today. It's a great story, Ruth, especially since you've reported on two milestone anniversaries.
Great piece Ruth!! Makes us want to check out our local steamed pastrami deli here soon!! I love the history of Langers!! Very interesting!