Legendary Katz’s Deli is known for its delicious corned beef and Instagrammable pastrami sandwiches. They do have other things — burgers and bagels — but let’s be real this is a meat eater place where you go for some mouth-watering sandwiches.
However, vegetarians can get in on the action too. Instead of generous cuts of meat, a veggie eater can pile a crazy amount of cheese in between those two slices of bread. This is not a new thing. This $11.95 sandwich has been on the menu for over 15 years, according to the owner Jack Dell, after requests from “vegetarians who insisted on a sandwich option.”
The meatless sandwich got its moment of Twitter fame yesterday, when a user posted a photo with the caption calling it an “abomination.”
J.R. Hennessy was the one who posted the photo and wrote about the sandwich saying, “I assumed this was some kind of known deli quantity, but every American in the vicinity was like ‘What the fuck is that?”
In all honesty, it does look like a lot of cheese. (3/4 pounds of cheese, all those slices of Swiss, Muenster, or America are equal to the same weight as the meat in normal sandwiches).
There are indeed other options vegetarians can get off the Katz Deli menu, but sometimes you want the familiarity of a great sandwich prepared with love and just because you don’t eat meat anymore doesn’t mean you can’t stuff your sandwich with the next best ingredient. So the logic holds up.
Dell writes in an email, “The heart wants what it wants I guess.” Though he also admits that not too many people have ordered the sandwich over the years.
