Saul's Restaurant & Delicatessen
Pastrami cured in house off Bill Niman's grass-fed beef, on a rye Peter Levitt worked out with Acme's Steve Sullivan. Three owners have sold deli at 1475 Shattuck since 1955.
Why go
This block has eaten here a long time. The railroad ran past a produce depot in the 1930s. A lunch counter called the Pantry Shelf opened in 1955. David Rosenthal bought it and renamed it Rosenthal's. In 1986 a partnership led by Andra Lichtenstein took it over and named it for her father, Saul Lichtenstein.1 Karen Adelman started as a server in 1989. Levitt came in as chef in 1995, out of Chez Panisse and Oliveto. They bought it together in 1996.
Then Levitt did the difficult thing. He decided there was no such thing as a New York Jewish deli outside New York and rebuilt the menu around local seasonal buying, which took leadership and often painful conversation with its customer base.
2 He went to Steve Sullivan at Acme Bread and the two of them worked out a handmade fermented rye on real rye flour. He went to Bill Niman early in that ranching career for pastrami beef. The fish comes from Monterey Fish Company, a few blocks north on Hopkins.2
The kitchen is passing on. In August 2022 Levitt and Adelman named two partners. One is Jesus Chuy
Mendoza, who had run the Saul's kitchen for a decade. The other is Sam Tobis of Oakland's Grand Bakery. They meant to hand over gradually.1 Tobis has since hired a baker and given over part of the office to baking, so the babka, rugelach and black-and-white cookies are new work on old recipes.
Order this / avoid
- Order: pastrami on the rye, and a celery tonic, which the house makes itself.2
- Avoid: measuring it against Katz's. That comparison is the exact thing Levitt spent thirty years refusing.
What locals & experts say
- Sam Tobis, incoming partner, to Berkeleyside on 3 August 2022:
Peter came up in the heart of the California food movement, and I think he's one of the most underappreciated deli men in the country. Saul's is East Coast and Eastern Europe meets Middle East, from comfort shtetl fare to falafel and house-made pita every day. This cross-pollination of food from the Jewish diaspora is just fabulous.
1 - Karen Adelman, co-owner, same piece, on why the sale took six years: they sought owners who understood the restaurant's role
not only as a longstanding and popular restaurant, but also as a Jewish gathering spot.
1
Good to know
- Timing: it is a deli and a restaurant, so breakfast and lunch are the meals.
- Sourcing: all Acme bread, fair-trade organic coffee, cage-free organic eggs, and fish from Monterey Fish Company.2
- Getting there: Shattuck at Vine, at the top of the Gourmet Ghetto, two blocks up from Chez Panisse.
Verdict
should-visit — Two sources hold this up and neither is doing PR. Berkeleyside traced the ownership back to a 1955 lunch counter and named every hand it passed through, which is the kind of record most restaurants cannot produce. The venue page carries Levitt explaining a position he had to fight his own regulars over, and the supplier names he went and got are checkable at Acme and at Niman. Sam Tobis, who is buying the place, is the one person quoted judging the food. The top rung wants a critic instead, and I have no critic's line on the pastrami to hand you.