Great Pastrami Taste-Off Matches Sandwiches From L.A.’s Top Delis : And the Winner Is . . . a Surprise

Pastrami, as everybody knows, should be eaten hot. But we sacrificed temperature for variety, opting to taste pastrami sandwiches from each of L.A.’s top delis at the same time.

We sent a runner to pick them up; she brought them back to The Times and put them on numbered plates so that the tasters had no idea which sandwich came from which deli. Tasters were collected at random; there were three food writers (one a dedicated pastrami maven) and assorted hungry Calendar writers. We set to work.

First, we noted the size of each sandwich. This was not a lot of trouble--they were surprisingly similar. As one taster noted, “Any one of these would feed a small Third World country.”

Then we began to chew. The sandwiches turned out to be amazingly diverse, despite the fact that they all looked more or less the same. Much of the meat even came from the same purveyor. The pastrami, however, had been finished in such a particular way at the delis that each sandwich had its own very distinct character. And although they were all served on rye bread, those breads also turned out to be remarkably different.

The results, as you can see, were surprising. The ratings:

1. Canter’s. Canter’s? It tasted like classic pastrami; was not too fatty, not too strong, not too chewy. This sandwich was rated first by two people, second by two people and fourth by two people; nobody, in other words, disliked it. And at $5.80 it was the cheapest of the lot. 2. Art’s. Good straightforward pastrami with lots of spice and pepper. It came in so close to Canter’s as not to be statistically different.

3. Stage. A strong favorite with some people, (rated in the top two by three tasters) and strongly disliked by others (three tasters ranked it in the bottom two), it was the most distinctive. I liked it a lot: it had black edges, was very smoky, very lean and quite spicy. 4. Langer’s. Pink, pleasant and not disliked by anybody. One taster called it “junk food pastrami”; another called it “Rabbi Sanders.” Personally, I thought it tasted exactly the way you imagine pastrami should taste. The meat was thickly sliced, and everybody agreed that this bread was the best.

5. Nate n’ Al’s. Fatty but not greasy, it looked very different than Langer’s. This was lean meat with little fat and really dark edges. The meat itself was very thinly sliced.

6. Jerry’s Famous. Too fatty and not a lot of flavor was the general consensus.

7. Carnegie. Surprise. It was the smallest and, at $7.95, the most expensive sandwich. The bread was thin and from the small end of the loaf. The black-edged meat seemed dry and overcooked with an unspicy flavor and a texture with the unpleasant feeling of congealed fat.

8. Junior’s. Nobody liked this one. My comment: fatty and flavorless, with an overwhelming impression of salt.