We finally got the green light and are a go on our deli. Wheeeeee.
I’m so excited and absolutely petrified. My husband and I had our first huge argument, so we got that out of the way. I’m amazed there was no blood. Seriously, it was that bad and over something so silly. I mean, paint colors should not lead to such a fight.
But no one is dead and today is a new day and all that.
So I ask you to share your favorite deli food with me for consideration on our menu.
We already plan to have your typical deli sandwiches, like Ham, Turkey, Pastrami, Corned beef?, etc. We hope to offer as authentic a Cuban sandwich as we can, considering the Cuban bread I grew up with is not available (that I know of) here in California. We have already put out some feelers with a local bakery to bake our breads.
We’ll have chili and some soups. Salads, like potato and seafood. We’re going to look into a small green salad cart type thingie.
Everyone we talked to yesterday is super excited about this little place being open again. And almost without fail, they expressed hope that we will carry the Chinese Chicken Salad that the previous people offered. We do have the ingredients for this salad pasted to the wall of the shop, but no instructions on what to do with them.
This isn’t really a big deal with one exception. It calls for Ramen, but I don’t know if it’s supposed to be cooked or not. I guess we’ll try it both ways, but if anyone here has an opinion on this, I’d love to hear it. Could save us a few dollars and some time in trying to figure it out.
Google “Ramen chinese chicken salad” - there’s a bunch of hits. I’ve had what you described before, and though it’s not my favorite, I can see how it’d be a hit.
Other than that, what I like in a deli is some variety - maybe a daily special or something like that, as well as a selection of your normal deli sandwiches. High-quality meat, cheese, and bread is essential. A good chef’s salad is always nice. A selection of healthy along with unhealthy is great - some days I want fruit with my sandwich, some days I’m going to go with the cookie, if you know what I mean.
Also essential, if you’re catering to a business crowd: be quick. We have one deli in my small town here that is amazingly good. They even roast their own meats, and they bring in cheeses not available anywhere else in town. Still, I rarely go there, because experience has shown me that one simply deli sandwich off the menu (ie, not personalized, just the “turkey and swiss” on the menu) takes 10-15 minutes to make if I go in when they’re slow. If it’s busy? 15-25 minutes. If I had that amount of time, I’d go to a sit-down place and get waited on.
Meatballs in tomato sauce, meatballs in green sauce, meatballs in mushroom sauce, fishballs in mushroom sauce, fish a la romana (clean, salt, “bread” them in flour and then egg, fry), different types of pasta salad, pasta bolognese, stuffed chicken thighs.
I see a theme there… no, seriously, the reason there’s all those -balls there is that you make a complete meal just by adding some rice or pasta and the resulting dish is good for bringing to my office’s two-microwaves kitchen.
There was a deli near where I used to work that was very popular. They had sandwiches with “names” – like the Dave, the Bob, the whatever. People liked that. And they had fabulous carrot cake, and always ran out. I asked “If you always run out of carrot cake, why don’t you make more carrot cake?” But answer there came none.
Good, good pickles and high-quality chips.
Some salads with ramen involve breaking up the ramen and soaking it in the dressing in lieu of cooking them in water. Others have it added as a topping and it stays crunchy. But if the salad was mixed up and held for a while, they would get soft anyway. You should ask the people askinng about it if the noodles were crunchy or not, and whether they just scooped it up or if they sprinkled the noodles on top at the last minute.
Thanks for moving this to the correct forum. And thanks to everyone for all the suggestions.
Some very good ideas here that we had not considered. We did ask one lady if those ramen noodles were cooked, but since it’s been almost two years since the place was open, she couldn’t remember. I think miss V above may have hit on the right answer. The vinegary dressing probably softens the noodles.
This so reminds me of the deli in Sibley’s Department store years ago, I used to take the office lunch order and bring back sandwiches, but mostly little containers of green salad. Plain lettuce with slivers of black olive, red cabbage, drenched in old-fashioned Kraft Italian dressing (that they revised since and it’s not the same :()…The only thing I can say is, try to be quick at lunchtime, people just hate hate hate waiting a long time. I love delis! Good luck!
There was a deli I used to frequent. One thing they had that I really liked was a BLT. But it wasnt on sliced bread, it was on a “sub roll” of some sort. And unlike many BLTs you get, it was LOADED with bacon and the tomotoes that actually had flavor.
And I’ll throw out a few near hearesy suggestions. A grilled cheese, hamburgers, and hotdogs. Yeah, these are more your fast food fair. But, IMO these simple items can be pretty damn good when you use quality ingredients and/or fancy them up a bit with unique breads and or interesting but tasty variations on the classic. Simple classics done right can be the bomb.
For that matter, since you will have a large assortment of meats, breads and other sandwichy stuff, it can’t hurt to just experiment. The number of possible combinations is probably mindboggling. Maybe have an “experimental sandwich of the week”, perhaps offered at a slight discount. Come up with them yourself or maybe take customer suggestions or make it a small contest even. If it gets good reviews, make it a regular item. Or pull a McRib and offer it for a limited time every now and then.
Oh, and like somebody else said. Cute or theme names (along with a good description that makes the mouth water) for various items never hurts.
And double Oh, I saw a Ramsey’s kitchen nighmares last night. On thing he did, which seems so obvious, is to go around and see what ELSE is offered in the local area. Think about something folks might really like to have that you could offer that they can’t get anywhere else. For example, Bob might be jonesing for a perfect BLT he can’t get anywhere else so he will go to your place, and if your place is decent his other coworkers that don’t care about BLTs, but like your other offerings might come along anyway.
Oh, and check out this link if you haven’t already: The Best Sandwiches in America Now this article is all opinion and I could do without many of the sandwiches, but at least visiting some of the restaurant links could give you an idea of what makes a deli a Deli.
One easy trick that makes customers happy and come back, and is great for inventory, is what a deli I loved in NYC did: Use a huge ice cream scoop to dig in and put that big ball of chicken salad/tuna salad/egg salad etc onto the sandwich!
It looked like a lot!
Nobody ever complained you were “chintzy” that day with making the sandwich and every sandwich was always the exact same size.
The customer could smash it down, or eat some with a fork and ditch the bread.
It seemed so sanitary and proportional.
Once you figure out that bowl had, for instance, 25 scoops and you sell each for $4 then you can easily calculate how much profit is in each bowl. Also, you don’t have to worry about if you, or your husband, or future employees are giving too much or too little.
As far as favorite sandwiches - Capriottis makes a capistrami sandwich that is great.
They throw the pastrami on the grill, get it nice and extra warm/hot, then throw on provolone cheese and let it just melt until it is soft. That is all scooped up, put on a long sub bread, add Russian dressing and top with a layer of cole slaw. It is excellent and one of their biggest selling sandwiches.
And speed is of the essence - when you only have a short lunch break, the last thing you want to do is stand in line for 3/4 of your break. So make sure everything is ready to go and you have a good conveyer belt system in place - one takes the order and money and the other is whipping up the sandwich. Throw in a “free” bag of chips - let them pick which kind.
Oh, and offer those small, individual containers of cottage cheese. Those on a diet appreciate the simplicity of it, and some like it as a side dish.
