Where art thou, O pastrami???

Cafe Society
1

Halfway through night two of its special my local pub ran out of pastrami.

I noticed Subway offers pastrami hoagies but only one month a year as a special and not year round.

I live in PA, and you’d be hard pressed to find any establishment here that offers pastrami on its regular menu---- but it must be popular if the pub sold out of it after only a day and a half right?

What gives? Is pastrami hard to get outside of NYC? Is there little profit margin for a restaurants that offer it? Is there only a certain time of the year you can butcher the right meat to make it? Is there some sort of Pastrami Mafia that is hording it? Why is it so hard to get friggin pastrami here???

2

Maybe George Costanza, who finds pastrami to be the most sensual of the salted cured meats, is hoarding them for architectural purposes.

3

There’s actually a pastrami shortage. The cost of beef brisket (its main ingredient) has increase by over 50% in the past two years. Many restaurants can’t absorb the increase in price, since there’s only so much people are willing to pay for a sandwich.

In general, though, pastrami is a Jewish dish and was created by Jewish immigrants in NYC. It didn’t spread to places where there weren’t many Jews.

4

There seems to be no shortage of pastrami in the Jewish delis here.

5

Sherman’s has great Pastrami.

6

Thats a great link, and answers a lot of questions,

How ironic that a meat flavored for the poor now has become a pricey rarity?

7

Pastrami is an odd food for me. I really want to like pastrami. I like every other form of brisket. I generally like the spices used on it. And It looks really damn good. So every other year or so I try it again.
And when I do, inexplicably, I still don’t like it. Drives me crazy.

8

I didn’t see any pastrami in my local deli recently, so I settled for corned beef. Since it was Boar’s Head, it was a reasonable substitute.

If there is a severe beef shortage, why does it affect only pastrami? Wouldn’t it affect a MacDonald’s hamburger too?

9

Has anybody noticed a shortage of corned beef as well? Pastrami is smoked corned beef, which is made from brisket…

10

Probably better to say that the current fad for brisket in BBQ is exacerbating the rise in the price of brisket which used to be used mainly for corned beef and pastrami. Reminiscent of the price rise for hanger/skirt streak, once the least expensive but most flavorful cuts of beef, available in ethnic markets for cheap. Now you can’t find it and when you do it’s expensive. All the upscale restaurants making upscale dishes.

11

Yeah, Wall Street Journal wrote recently about the spike in brisket prices. There’s also the drought from a couple of years ago which has increased beef prices across the board. I was buying brisket at around $2.50/lb for a packer cut as recently as 2013 (according to my emails and notes), but now I’m lucky if I can find it for much under $5/lb. This article confirms the rise in brisket prices, which stood at an average of $5.99/lb at the beginning of this year and were $2.99/lb a year ago. So the popularity of brisket, coupled with the beef shortage from the drought has driven the price of brisket to nearly double what it was just a short time ago.