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Food guide

How to find a good deli

A deli cures and cooks its own meat. A sandwich shop buys it sliced. Both can make you lunch, but only one of them is doing the thing the word means, and the difference is visible from the door.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • A slicer running constantly — Meat sliced when you order it. Pre-sliced deli meat oxidises and goes leathery within hours, and it is the single biggest quality variable.
  • Pastrami hand-carved, not machine-sliced — Jewish delis carve navel pastrami by hand in thick irregular slices. Machine-thin pastrami is a different eating experience entirely.
  • Meat cured on site, or a named supplier — The good ones will tell you. Vagueness usually means a distributor.
  • Pickles from a barrel — Half-sour and full-sour, from brine rather than a jar, brought to the table unasked.
  • Rye with a real crust and caraway — Seeded corn rye. Soft sandwich bread under pastrami is a structural failure.

What to order

  • Pastrami on rye, mustard only — No mayonnaise, no lettuce. The benchmark, and the only correct construction.
  • Corned beef — The comparison. If both are good, the deli is good.
  • Matzo ball soup — A floater or a sinker — both camps are right, and it tells you about the kitchen.
  • A knish — Potato, baked not fried, if they make their own.
  • Black-and-white cookie — For later.

Where to find delis

Open listings put 14,350 delis across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 834 Philadelphia, PA 194 San Francisco, CA 102 Chicago, IL 94 Houston, TX 86 Los Angeles, CA 85 San Diego, CA 84 Washington, DC 70 Baltimore, MD 70 Seattle, WA 66 Hempstead, NY 54 Yonkers, NY 52

Campuses with the most within a mile

Touro University 162 CUNY Graduate Center 155 Baruch 133 FIT 122 The New School 116 NYU 110 John Jay 70 BMCC 60 Hunter 59 Pace University 58

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

Delis near campus

How Savor Scout looks for it

Deli searches read for house-cured and hand-carved language and for a visible slicer, which is what separates a deli from a sandwich counter. The matcher also reads for Italian delis and salumerias under the same query, since the same signals apply to both traditions.

Find delis near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

When you might want this

Where to take the team for lunch Where to eat when you're broke Where to take friends visiting from out of town