RESTAURANT REVIEW : Stage Deli: New York via Century City

“Too much glass,” said one of my deli mavens, waving his arm. Too much glass? “Look at all the windows. This isn’t a deli. You could get a tan in here.” Great. This is why I’d asked the mavens to join me at the Stage Deli. I’m a Valley boy, I couldn’t possibly know all the fine points. Myself, I was just glad we got in with less than a 45-minute wait. As the only real restaurant yet open in the new Century City Marketplace, the Stage Deli has been packed every time I’ve been by. No reservations taken, either; you fight your way up to the reception area and then stand around outside until they call your name through the screen window.

We finally got a table and noticed that the theatrical posters on the walls were not for stage shows but for movies. But we all stared goggle-eyed at the size of the sandwiches being delivered, some of them close to five inches high. “Now that’s a sandwich,” said a maven admiringly. “Yeah, but let’s see him eat it,” said another. In fact, it turns out the only way to eat a triple-decker sandwich of corned beef, pastrami, turkey, Swiss cheese and coleslaw is to take it apart and eat it as a couple of open-faced sandwiches.

The mavens were impressed with the menu. There were 60-some sandwiches, half a dozen fish platters, a lot of Jewish-mamma dishes and a fairly broad fountain selection. We ordered a Neil Diamond sandwich (“NY’s Best Corned Beef and Pastrami, Plain but Piled High”) to test the waters. OK corned beef, said the mavens (to me, it was excellent, surprisingly garlicky). Great pastrami, they admitted: garlicky, peppery, smoky and surpassingly meaty. And even the most exacting of the mavens noticed that the sandwich was filled all the way to the edge.

But there was a growing restlessness as the meal proceeded. “The chicken soup, it’s OK, but the matzo ball and the kreplach, they’re so . . . light.” “The potato pancakes have the wrong texture, too smooth.” “The chicken liver is bland.” “What is this, a potato knish wrapped in strudel?” And finally, the most damning thing of all: the bagel. It looked like a bagel, but it didn’t have the dense, chewy, soft-pretzel texture of a bagel. It was a bun baked in the shape of a bagel. A Californianized bagel! I was ashamed to admit I liked it better than a real bagel (I get plenty of jaw exercise in my work as it is), but there was no getting around it. This was not a bagel. I was eating at a branch of the Stage Deli and I was eating a soft toasted bun instead of a bagel.

This had all been pretty disturbing, but everybody calmed down a little at dessert. There was a genuine Brooklyn egg cream, that ultra-simple drink of milk, chocolate syrup and seltzer water that is regularly ruined in California by being made with soda water. The New York cheesecake, with a fine balance of sweet and sour and a good cheesy flavor, was pronounced excellent. But then a maven who had been strangely quiet over her plate of salmon, sturgeon and whitefish bit into the rugelach, a sort of rolled butter cookie with cinnamon, nuts and raisins, and her eyes widened in horror. “Chocolate bits! There are chocolate bits in the rugelach!”

“It’s simple,” I said, raising my hands in a characteristic helpless gesture. “Welcome to Hollywood. This is . . . the Soundstage Deli.”

Stage Deli of New York, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 553-DELI. Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily (until 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday nights). Full bar. Parking lot. All major credit cards accepted. Sandwich and an egg cream for one, $6.25 - $10.45.