Frankel’s

Pastrami folded into the morning shift

The egg and cheese lands hot, folded with pastrami for the early rush. Alex Frankel, chef at Frankel’s in Greenpoint, New York City, works in that register: direct, filling, and clear about what a sandwich has to do before the day has properly started. His food comes from an Upper West Side childhood shaped by the old appetizing shops and deli counters that made breakfast a civic habit, not a special occasion. Frankel has said of his background, “We really came from a music background,” and the remark fits the place without turning the counter into theater. The discipline is rhythm, repetition, and knowing when not to dress the form up. At Frankel’s, the hot pastrami, matzo ball soup, potato latkes, Reuben, brisket sammy, lox bagel, and pastrami egg and cheese stay close to the grammar that made them durable: salt, smoke, fat, rye, broth, crunch, cream cheese, appetite. The current deli opened in April 2016 on a Greenpoint corner, but its emotional map runs back through family meals, post-temple breakfasts, and the older New York shops where appetizing food taught generations how to wait at a counter.

Thick cuts, hand-rolled bagels, no tricks

The program is traditional by choice. Bagels are hand-rolled; hot pastrami and corned beef are cooked daily and finished onsite; smoked fish comes from Acme Smoked Fish, close enough to keep the appetizing side of the counter tied to Brooklyn rather than abstraction. The pastrami is the house measure. It comes thick, tender, smoky, and warm enough to make rye feel like a tool rather than a garnish. On the pastrami egg and cheese, the meat changes the whole register of the breakfast sandwich, pushing the eggs and melted cheese toward the weight of deli food without losing the speed of counter service. Latkes hold the other end of the method: a crisp edge, a creamy center, sour cream or applesauce beside them. Matzo ball soup gives the kitchen its quieter test, because broth and texture leave little place to hide. Frankel’s does not make the familiar unrecognizable. It trusts the old forms and asks the hands to keep them steady.

The counter keeps the pace

The room is light, bright, and close to the street, with the no-frills nostalgia of a deli that knows the counter matters more than the décor. Family photographs sit behind the work, not as museum pieces but as part of the visual noise of the place, beside the ordering, the wrapping, the coffee, the quick scan for an open seat. A pastrami sandwich cools if the pass lingers. A lox bagel wants the cream cheese spread cleanly and the fish laid with enough care to keep the bite balanced. The seating is limited, the sound conversational, the room intimate enough that the line, the counter, and the bench-side motions share the same air. This is where the craft happens, in short exchanges and repeated gestures.

A deli form kept in use

Frankel’s belongs to a newer Brooklyn chapter of Jewish deli life, one aware that New York once had far more of these rooms than it does now. The point here is not preservation under glass. It is use. The menu keeps returning to food that can carry a morning, a lunch, or a shared table without apology. If the close has to rest on one object, let it be the pastrami egg and cheese, built for appetite and handed over the Frankel’s counter.