Langer's Deli Won the L.A. Times Gold Award. Order the Plain Pastrami.

The 1947 Westlake deli steams its pastrami up to five hours, and the No. 19 is its most popular sandwich.

Langer's Deli, the pastrami counter at 7th and Alvarado streets in Westlake, near MacArthur Park, has won this year's L.A. Times Gold Award. Laurie Ochoa, who runs food coverage at the Los Angeles Times, announced it on Sept. 27.

The sandwich people call the best in America is built to fall apart. Langer's pastrami loses up to 38% of its weight in the steamer, and the rye has to be used within an hour of its second bake or it's ruined, Norm Langer, the owner, told the Times.

Nobody copies that, because copying it means losing money on purpose.

So order the sandwich that shows the work. I'd get the plain hot pastrami on the twice-baked rye with Gulden's spicy brown mustard, which also happens to be Ochoa's order. The No. 19 piles coleslaw, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing on top of the two things Langer's spends the most to get right.

The No. 19 is the house bestseller, and Bill Addison, the Times restaurant critic, wrote in 2022 that it "should be named the official sandwich of Los Angeles." It can be the city's sandwich. It's still the second one to order.

My verdict rests on 35 years of critics and the Langers' own account of how the thing gets made, not on a meal. Those critics have been close to unanimous. Jonathan Gold wrote in the Times in 1991 that Langer's "probably serves the best pastrami sandwich in America," and he'd dropped the "probably" by 2005.

The New York verdicts are the ones that count, because those writers had every reason to root for home. Nora Ephron called it "the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world" in the New Yorker in 2002. Mimi Sheraton, the late New York Times critic, went looking for great rye in 2012 and admitted, with some embarrassment, that the best she knew was at Langer's.

The other comparison is the ordinary deli. Plenty of them steam pastrami for about 45 minutes, Langer told the Times. That leaves it tough enough that it has to be machine-sliced paper-thin. His late father, Al, once compared that meat to "a racquetball." Langer's steams its pastrami for two and a half to five hours, until it's too tender for a machine, so it gets carved by hand.

The carver is often Jaime Castaneda, a longtime manager who has worked the counter for 43 years, or 44, depending on whether you ask him or his boss. "It doesn't happen without me," Langer told Ochoa. "But it also doesn't happen without him."

The bread has a history, too. Al Langer started rebaking day-old rye in 1936 at a short-lived deli in Palm Springs, where loaves arrived by Greyhound from Detroit Bakery in Boyle Heights. The rye now comes from Fred's Bakery and Deli in Beverlywood, and Norm still fusses over it: during the recent heat wave, he blamed bakery fans for putting a skin on the dough.

The real knock on this award is about the prize itself. The Gold Award, started in 2017, is meant to honor people "expanding the notion of what Southern California cooking might be," and a Jewish deli serving essentially the pastrami it served Gold in 1991 looks like the safest pick there is.

That changes once you look at the corner it's on. Langer spent years pushing politicians and police to clean up blocks the Times described as troubled for decades by drugs and gangs. He told columnist Steve Lopez in 2024 that he was weighing a closure, and Mayor Karen Bass met with him days later. Keeping a classic deli open to all of Los Angeles on that corner is its own way of widening what L.A. cooking means.

Since then, the LAPD and federal agents ramped up drug arrests in June. There's a $40-million cleanup project for the lake and park, and a lot of customers have begged him to stay. Late last year, Langer pledged to keep the doors open at least through the 2028 Olympics, "and likely beyond."

The menu goes deeper than two sandwiches: a pastrami Reuben called the No. 44, a pastrami-and-corned-beef combo called the No. 54, even pastrami chili cheese fries. Save those for the second trip.

The Times will present the award at 8 p.m. on Oct. 23 at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, during its 101 Best Restaurants event. The pastrami stays where it's been since 1947, at 7th and Alvarado.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 27, 2026.