THE DEAN OF DELI

“Natalie, darling,” he shouts at a Carnegie Deli waitress, waving a hand vaguely toward a man lowering himself to a table, “see my friend, Mr. Shapiro, gets linen.”

The voice sounds like an afternoon at Ebbett’s Field--and it is almost as loud. Natalie snatches the paper napkin off the table of the honored Mr. Shapiro; she hands him his new linen napkin as if it were a trophy. Leo Steiner gives a satisfied nod and continues on the rounds of his kingdom, fielding phone calls, throwing orders, catching the occasional wisecrack. He moves from table to table schmoozing, tasting, scolding. He does almost everything except sit still and be quiet.

Now he is cutting off a corner of chocolate rugallah cheesecake (“Catherine Deneuve loves it”) and popping it into his mouth. “Every morning I come in and I taste the cheesecake, and in a minute I know if I am going to kill my baker. Because the cheesecake, it’s very delicate. You need condensation. You bake it five minutes too much and it gets this crack in the middle, the steam goes out and the texture becomes like pot cheese instead of cream cheese. The secret of this business is you got to constantly taste.

“Natalie,” he says, without turning his head, “get me some rolls.”

She comes back with the rolls, three kinds, and he holds them out, running his hands across them as if they were fur. “Feel that,” he says, “No, go ahead, feel it. See how soft?” He takes a bite of pickle too, then asks for coffee with a little skim milk.

Leo Steiner believes in deli. “My partner, Freddie Klein, calls it a religion.” He believes that it is the quintessential American food (“New York deli is not ethnic anymore. Who doesn’t know what chopped liver is?”) And he believes it is his personal mission in life to maintain the quality of the product. “We make everything ourselves. You can feed a man--and when I say a man, I mean a man or a woman--a fair product all their lives. Feed them a good product just one or twice and the third time they know the difference. That’s what I’d like to show the American public.”

Press him a little harder and you will discover that the lox does not stop there; Steiner’s deli aspirations are global in scope. “Reagan,” he says, “really knows his novi. The Japanese foreign mister loves my novi too. And that guy from Germany . . . (Chancellor Helmut) Kohl, he loves my corned beef.”

Quality, of course, is only one aspect of deli; in Steiner’s mind, quantity is almost as important. “Nobody,” he says, watching a new patron look incredulous as a corned beef sandwich the size of a small mountain is put before him, “walks out of the Carnegie hungry. We got so much here in this country. Why should we give a person a little bit of food? Are we a starving Third World nation?”

“Henny,” he interrupts himself suddenly, “where are you going?”

Henny Youngman walks over and smiles affectionately. “Leo,” he says, “is the kosher ham.” He points to a picture of a robust looking fellow that hangs over the cashier’s desk. “See that picture over there?” asks Youngman. “That’s Leo, when he weighed 75 pounds more.”

And weight may be the real reason why New York’s most famous deli will not be coming to Beverly Hills. Steiner will say only that the deal between himself and Marvin Davis “just didn’t work out.” But then he points at a waiter. “Look at Herb over there. He spreads his arms magnanimously. “Look at all my waiters. You see the size of them? Take them to California, let them see sunshine they would have to go on a diet. It would ruin them.”