Reforming the deli?

In fairness, kosher dairy restaurants have long been health conscious:


http://tinyurl.com/y8xcpgh


Making Delis a Cut Above by Rewriting Menus With Local Foods


By JULIA MOSKIN

WHEN a Jewish deli decides to stop serving salami, something is wrong in the cosmos.

At Saul's Restaurant and Deli in Berkeley, Calif., the eggs are organic and cage free, and the ground beef in the stuffed cabbage is grass fed. Its owners, Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt, yanked salami from the menu in November, saying that they could no longer in good conscience serve commercial kosher salami.

...

The two are still trying to find, or make, salami that will align with their vision of the deli of the future: individual, sustainable, affordable and ethical.

New delis, with small menus, passionate owners and excellent pickles and pastrami, are rising up and rewriting the menu of the traditional Jewish deli, saying that it must change, or die. For some of them, the main drawback is the food itself, not its ideological underpinnings.

So, places like the three-month-old Mile End in Brooklyn; Caplansky's in Toronto; Kenny & Zuke's in Portland, Ore.; and Neal's Deli in Carrboro, N.C., have responded to the low standard of most deli food - huge sandwiches of indifferent meat, watery chicken soup and menus thick with shtick - by moving toward delicious handmade food with good ingredients served with respect for past and present.

"I have a dream of a multiplicity of pastramis," said Ken Gordon, a co-owner of Kenny & Zuke's, one of a handful of delis in the country where the pastrami is smoked over hardwood. It opened in 2007, an outgrowth of the "barbecue nights" that Mr. Gordon used to hold at his French bistro. (He closed it to devote himself full time to bialys and corned beef.).