Arnie’s Manhattan: A Few Bites From the Big Apple

Deli lovers are purists, even zealots. Back East, in the heartland of the deli way of life, they like their pastrami hand-cut into thick steamy slices and piled up on caraway rye smeared with dark brown mustard. Legend has it that the great Broadway actor Zero Mostel once flew into a froth at the sight of a tourist ordering a pastrami on white with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. He stood on his chair and bellowed, “Get . . . out . . . of . . . this . . . restaurant!” The regulars gave him a standing ovation.

But here in the deli hinterland, one must be practical. There are few, if any, professional countermen around to slice off a little extra; no hanging salamis, pickled tomatoes or gravy-splattered hunks of stuffed kishke to fight over. Instead, we get places like Arnie’s Manhattan, now with a second location in Newport Beach’s MacArthur Square. It’s no problem to satisfy a craving for deli here, but usually you have to do it on goodies like fresh bagels, commercially smoked fish and chewy homemade cookies.

Oh, well. We have better weather.

The Newport Beach location is sunny and spacious, offering booth and table seating on either side of a front deli counter. Paintings that are essentially montages of New York City street life add splashes of color, but basically this space is industrial-park neutral, all whites and grays and with none of the quirky vitality that makes a deli like Canter’s in the Fairfax District so memorable.

So all right, already. Some of this food is memorable enough, and besides, did you come here to eat or did you come here to kvetch?

The restaurant opens at 6 a.m. daily, when a few brave souls come to nosh on the huge breakfasts, deli omelets and such, most of which come with massive quantities of hand-cut home-fried potatoes. Matzo brei is always a possibility, a starched-up version of scrambled eggs fried with pieces of broken matzo. The most common way to eat it is with maple syrup. Think of it as kosher French toast, body and soul.

Then there are generous platters of smoked fish, garnished with cream cheese, beautiful slices of purple Bermuda onion, tomatoes and great chewy bagels. Arnie’s serves good, large portions of fish: dense slabs of kippered salmon; buttery, delicately smoked chunks of whitefish; firm, deep orange slices of Nova lox, cut long and thick, curled up on the plate.

If you like a really hearty breakfast, try an order of the crisp, heavy potato pancakes--three large cakes with golden crusts served with tubs of sour cream and applesauce. The restaurant also squeezes great orange juice to order, and what a difference. Most places call their juice fresh but give you something poured out of a plastic bottle. And don’t be afraid to order the cappuccino, either, even if a real New York deli would probably have you thrown out bodily for such blasphemy. It’s quite good.

At lunch time, the restaurant draws more of a crowd. Every table is equipped with a huge glass jar full to the brim with pungent half-sour pickles and a pair of plastic tongs to extract them. The first thing that arrives at your table is a basket filled with the corner pieces from double-baked rye bread--meaning that the bread, already baked elsewhere, is given an additional turn in the deli’s own oven to ensure a thick, chewy crust.

I like to eat this bread with any of Arnie’s soups, particularly matzo ball or Hungarian goulash. The ball in this matzo ball soup is light and fluffy with a deliciously eggy finish, though the chicken broth surrounding it is fairly nondescript. Arnie’s goulash soup, though, is a triumph, a thick, ruddy beef soup infused with paprika and brimming with potato, all you need for a hearty lunch.

Order a sandwich, and it comes on the same good rye bread, unless you ask for a French roll. The best sandwich here is probably the brisket dip, great on either sort of bread. This is lean, soft, meaty brisket that you plunge into a salty dipping liquid, and it’s a huge sandwich for the price.

The restaurant steams its own corned beef, too, a credible version despite the machine slicing. Arnie’s pastrami, though, comes prepackaged from an Eastern meat producer called Boar’s Head. It’s tasty but hardly the stuff deli dreams are made of.

Huge, homemade potato and meat knishes are more like it, heavy pockets of dough that pretty much steal away the appetite. The potato knish follows the mold, with a soft potato filling much like that in a Russian vareniki. But this meat knish is like no other I have tasted. I believe that’s finely minced corned beef in the middle. It crumbles out when the knish is cut open.

And then there is the piece de resistance , Arnie’s fabulous Hungarian stuffed cabbage rolls, two giant rolls atop a bed of Hungarian-style sauerkraut. This is the only real entree this Arnie’s serves; the restaurant is not open for dinner. The cabbage is stuffed with a rich meat and rice filling, and the slightly sweet kraut is rust-colored, redolent of paprika. I couldn’t resist eating it with giant gobs of sour cream, even though that meant the dish would no longer be kosher.

Forgive me, Zero. If I were a rich man, I’d have my deli foods flown in from New York City, diggah deedle deedle dum dum dum.

Arnie’s Manhattan is inexpensive to moderate. Soups are $2 to $3.95. Sandwiches are $4.59 to $6.99. Salad and fish platters are $6.95 to $11.95.

* ARNIE’S MANHATTAN, 1660-B Dove St., Newport Beach. (714) 252-8646.

* Breakfast and lunch Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 3 p.m.

* American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted.