Jewish delicatessens seem to be closing faster these days than even movies about DC super-heroes. The latest shuttering is a personal one to me: Lenny's Deli in Westwood closes tonight, apparently for good. This will bring to an end, the story of Junior's Delicatessen…a favorite place of mine for well over half a century. It also means that Ken Levine and I have to find another place to meet for lunch.
Junior's started life as a small deli on Pico Boulevard, just east of Westwood. Maria's Italian Kitchen is now in that location. Junior's, when it was there, was a little, friendly place run by the Saul Brothers, Marvin and Eddie. They cut the meat. They waited on you. Most of their business was take-out but there were a few tables and chairs there and if you wanted to sit and eat your corned beef on rye, they'd make it behind the counter and bring it to your table.
That Junior's opened there in 1959. By 1967, they opened the larger, mostly sit-down restaurant a few blocks away on Westwood, just north of Pico. It was a great deli and fabulously successful. If you'd ever dreamed of owning your own delicatessen, you'd have dreamed of a place like that, full of regulars, many of them celebrities.
At some point — I know not when or why — Eddie Saul disappears from this story. He went out to the valley and opened a couple of delicatessens on his own. None of the articles written about Junior's after that mentioned him and once when I was there, when I innocently asked Marvin about his brother, I got back an icy silence and a stare that told me I'd brought up a forbidden topic. You now know as much about this as I do and probably ever will.
Junior's was very popular but it was always worth the wait for a table. I didn't think the corned beef was as good as Art's in Studio City, or the potato salad was as good as Nate n' Al's in Beverly Hills or the matzo ball soup was as good as Canter's over on Fairfax…but everything was way more than edible and Junior's had a great location and a fun atmosphere and a great bakery. Plus, you could often spot Mel Brooks eating there. Wouldn't you want to go to a deli where Mel Brooks ate? Of course you would.
I'm not sure if the decline started before or after Mel Brooks shifted his patronage mainly to Factor's Deli, a couple miles east on Pico. But by the turn of the century, Junior's wasn't as good as it had once been and was nowhere near as busy.
Some newspaper articles blamed management problems after Marvin Saul retired and turned the operation over to his kids. Well, maybe…but to us regular patrons, the problems started much earlier than that. Rising rents were also blamed and there's probably some truth to that explanation. But after Junior's closed at the end of 2012, the business was reopened two months later as Lenny's Deli by the local restauranteur Lenny Rosenberg. If Lenny could manage the rent, why couldn't the Sauls?
I think there were two problems. One was that the quality of Junior's had simply slipped. It just plain wasn't as good as it had once been. Mr. Rosenberg did a good job reversing time there…so good that once after Ken and I lunched there, we sought him out to thank him for his restoration job. But I guess there wasn't much he could do about the other problem, which is that people just don't go to Jewish-style delis as much as they once did. If you know it isn't good for you to eat a thick pastrami sandwich with a big knish and a chocolate egg cream, it's hard to go to a place that serves that and then order anything else.
Rumor has it that Lenny sold the place recently and it's the new owners who are closing it as of tonight. I'll miss it for any number of reasons but a biggie is that it was a landmark in one of the great memories of my life. This is going to sound silly but so do a lot of the great memories of my life…
In the early sixties, I fell in love with the work of the great satirist and recording artist Stan Freberg. There was a record store then on Westwood Boulevard — less than a mile from where I grew up — and I went there often in search of new Stan Freberg records. Maddeningly, they did not come out as rapidly as I wished, and I especially wanted to buy Volume II of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America.
Volume I was and still is the greatest comedy album I ever heard. Actually, it's not so much a comedy record as a great Broadway musical that never existed as anything but its cast album. In any case, I kept going back to that record store, week after week, asking if Volume II was out yet. It never was.
I stopped asking in 1967 for an understandable reason: The record store closed and the building containing it was torn down. The big, successful Junior's was built on that piece of land. And in 1996 in a booth in Junior's, Stan Freberg asked me to help him produce that second volume — on the exact same piece of real estate where thirty-four years earlier, I'd made a pest of myself asking, "Is Volume Two out yet?"
A lot of other great things happened at Junior's/Lenny's, as well, but that's my favorite.