We’ll have what they’re having.
The Lower East Side’s iconic Katz’s Delicatessen is teaming up with Dan Barber, the chef at Greenwich Village’s lauded farm-to-table restaurant Blue Hill, to serve, for one afternoon only, a vegan version of its famous pastrami sandwich.
The veggie sandwich, which will be served at the deli by Barber himself from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, features of Badger Flame beets, a yellow beet “that delivers the vegetable’s natural sweetness without the divisive earthy undertones,” according to press materials. The beets — just like traditional pastrami, made of brisket — are wet-brined, seasoned with a spice rub, smoked and steamed, then then sliced and served with mustard and deli rye.
“We’ve been hunting for years for a vegetarian pastrami option, but everything we tried just wasn’t quite right,” Katz’s third-generation owner Jake Dell said in a press release. “Meat substitutes didn’t hold the flavor correctly and were sometimes full of additives anyway. Other vegetable recipes just didn’t hold up in a sandwich form.”
The flame beet, however, “pulls off a Katz’s-caliber pastrami taste in a way we thought was impossible — it captures our classic spice notes and smoky ‘bark’ like no other vegetable we’ve seen,” he added.
The Badger Flame beet is the vision of “visionary public plant breeder” Irwin Goldman, who developed the sweet root crop for Row 7, Barber’s “seed to table” seed company. Barber, 54 — who also owns and operates Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant at the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York — grew up in a Jewish family in New York City and spent a lot of time on his grandmother’s farm in the Berkshires.
Earlier this year, the New York Times selected Katz’s pastrami sandwich as one of “57 Sandwiches That Define New York City,” where it was one of 11 Jewish sandwiches on the list.
“Pastrami ordered and eaten at Katz’s is both a meal and a ceremony,” writes then-critic Pete Wells, “one that can turn tourists into New Yorkers and New Yorkers into tourists.”
Will the vegetarian version have the same effect? There’s only one way to find out.
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