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Food

NYC's Famous Carnegie Deli Is Coming Back for a Week, But You Probably Won't Get In

Amazon is involved, because of course it is.
sandwich at Carnegie Deli

New York’s eternally iconic Carnegie Deli opened on 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan in 1937. Owner Marian Harper took down its red awning and locked its doors for the last time almost 80 years later, on December 30, 2016. A month after it closed, her daughter filled a plastic bin with some of the wood framed photos that lined the restaurant’s walls and shoved it outside onto the sidewalk for passers-by to pick through. That was it, we all thought. New York’s Carnegie Deli is dead.

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But nothing is really dead—not anymore. Not the Austin Powers franchise, not Murphy Brown, and definitely not pastrami sandwiches that can be deconstructed and sold online as $139 build-it-yourself meal kits. Carnegie Deli was never really gone—it still exists in Las Vegas, on some nights at Madison Square Garden, and, yeah, as a mail-order sandwich service—but the famed deli’s original New York outpost has announced that it’s coming back… sort of. And not for very long.

Carnegie Deli has partnered with Amazon, and they are joining forces to resurrect the eatery as a one-week only pop-up at 201 Lafayette Street in New York City. “ The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel celebrates its new season by creating an immersive Carnegie Deli pop-up experience for a limited time only, from December 1st through 8th,” the restaurant’s equally temporary website says. “And while it may be 2018 on the outside, it’s 1958 on the inside—the decor, the jukebox, the photobooth, and even the menu.”

Because The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is set in 1958, the Deli will also be “set” in the same year, which means that it’s selling sandwiches for 99 cents each, mini knishes for 75 cents, and desserts for two shiny quarters. It also means that every single reservation has been snapped up already, but walk-in customers are welcome, assuming that you want to stand outside in any number of gross weather conditions to get essentially the same sandwich that you could order online. (At a much higher price point, natch.)

There are only two 99-cent sandwiches on the menu, including “The Midge,” which is named after the Amazon show’s titular character. It features pastrami, salami, cole slaw, and an unexplained special sauce on rye bread, and you can decide if you’d like to eat this or if you’d just as soon go around the corner to Sweetgreen.

Just don’t expect any autographed pictures at this place—or for its caretakers to leave any memorabilia on the sidewalk afterward.