The matzo ball soup and thick sandwiches on rye have been lighting up Fairfax since 1931, and the iconic Canter’s Deli neon isn’t leaving the neighborhood anytime soon. The dishes, though, are finally coming closer to more Angelenos. L.A. Jewish deli institution Canter’s is expanding its reach, adopting a modern business model to bring their deli favorites to Pasadena, Downtown and beyond.
“The world is changing in how people get their food these days,” says Marc Canter, a third-generation Canter’s owner. “Now with the way all these online companies work—Postmates and Uber and Grubhub and DoorDash—they generally deliver three to four miles from the [restaurant], so if you put a Canter’s every 10 miles, you could cover the whole city.”
App- and web-based delivery services are a blessing to the Canter family, who for decades had been asked to open full-service locations beyond Fairfax. Operating costs, such as equipment and L.A. rent, are daunting enough as it is, but when coupled with the deli’s seemingly constant stream of customers and catering orders, dedicating the time and money to launch new locations from the ground, up, was out of the question. Enter commissary kitchens.
Photograph: Stephanie Breijo
Commissary or communal kitchens are a shared workspace for chefs, providing equipment and sometimes even staff to help get fledgling concepts off the ground and businesses in need of satellite locations a spot to make their same food but without the overhead costs of running a full-service restaurant.
Following a seven-year-run with a food truck, Canter’s decided to refocus its off-site options last year and launched out of a tiny, delivery-only commissary kitchen near Downtown to serve USC and the surrounding neighborhoods. Last week, Canter’s teamed up with Pasadena’s Kitchen United, a commercial-grade kitchen that not only rents a space for restaurants to make food, but offers customers a brick-and-mortar storefront for onsite eating, as well as delivery. What’s more, hungry Angelenos can mix and match items from Kitchen United’s tenants—so if you’re craving one of Canter’s pastrami sandwiches but you’re intrigued by Mama Musubi’s Japanese rice balls, you really can have it all.
Well, almost have it all. Canter’s satellite menus are limited, particularly at the Downtown outpost. In Pasadena, they offer a comprehensive mix of the staples: reubens, omelets, corned beef, pastrami, latkes and onion rings, not to mention all-day breakfast.
But unlike when you come to Canter’s on Fairfax, you can’t get items like kasha varnishkes and gefilte fish, nor the array of salads that greet you in the deli case: bean salads, smoked whitefish, pasta salads, the list goes on. The only fish you’ll find at the new outpost is lox, but the menu may change, depending on the feedback they receive.
Any die-hard fan of Fairfax’s deli knows that while the sandwiches get the most love, the baked goods are what not to miss. Thankfully, the Canter’s team bakes daily on Fairfax and brings over their pastries to the northeast: black-and-white cookies, ruggelach, cheesecake, rye bread and hamantaschen, among others.
“More concepts like this will come up in the future for us; we could do Burbank or Culver City or Brentwood—we could go to different areas with this kind of setup,” Canter says. “We have our sights on that. This one wasn’t that hard to do and we like the results, so there’s no reason why we wouldn’t expand it a little further.”
Photograph: Stephanie Breijo
Canter’s in Kitchen United is located at 55 S Madison Ave in Pasadena, with hours of 11:30am to 8pm.