Here are my 12 favorite pastrami sandwiches, ranked in descending order. The pandemic closed some wonderful purveyors, including Harry & Ida’s and Jay & Lloyd’s, but brought about many others. The modern era has seen a resurgence in its popularity and a broadening of its usage, following a decline during the no-fat ’90s.

Whatever the origin, pastrami remains the crown jewel of New York’s Jewish delis, admired and sought out by visitors from all over the world. For a time it became their exclusive province, even as Romanian Jewish restaurants ignored this avowedly American product and continued serving steaks and cutlets. Originally run by Germans, both Jewish and gentile, New York delis were quick to learn about and adopt the process. My own crackpot theory is that kosher butchers who operated in the Lone Star State around 1900 took an unwanted cut of meat that even the army wouldn’t buy, corned it, rubbed it with familiar Middle European spices, and preserved it by smoking, just as Texas barbecue was becoming increasingly popular in the state. Over the years, other ideas about pastrami’s evolution have emerged.

Pastrami in its ideal form is fatty, pink, and thickly hand-sliced. The result is a hopelessly rich cut of meat with a complex and distinctive flavor, in which smoky notes compete with the sweetness of the spices and the saltiness of the brine. In contrast with its dry, thinner-sliced cousin basturma, delectable in its own right, pastrami is made with beef brisket that’s brined for several days (a process known as corning), rubbed with a spice mixture that often contains black peppercorns, yellow mustard seeds, and coriander, and then smoked. If we’re talking about the origins of pastrami, most accounts will tell you it was inspired by the preserved meat called basturma, a lean cut of spice-rubbed and air-dried beef or goose, which spread throughout Eastern Europe by the Ottoman Empire over the centuries, and was later brought to America by Romanian Jewish immigrants who arrived between 18.

Barney greengrass deli