Oh, Brothers'

One morning about six weeks later I sat up in bed, the other level of what was so weird about that exchange finally clear in my mind: No one needs beef bacon--that's why God created pastrami! Pastrami--the cured, spiced, smoked, fatty cut of beef--is a meat that lives in that hallowed circle of comfort-food riches, like carnitas, confit, and bacon.

Oh, I wish my mind worked more quickly, because then I could have taken that farmer down into the digital and marble canyonlands of downtown Minneapolis, where pastrami is making a strong showing, along with its sister muses from the land of New York Delicatessen, like corned beef, brisket, rye bread, and pickles. That delicatessen thing, it's a strong passion, and it actually seems to have been huge in Minneapolis at one time.

In fact, Brothers' Deli owner Jeff Burstein, whom I spoke to on the phone for this piece, says that there were once 16 Brothers' restaurants, run by Burstein's father and uncle, Len and Sam. It all started in the 1920s, when Mike and Dora Burstein (the grandparents of Jeff, father of Len and Sam) started serving food in a private Jewish club, then went public with Mike's Café, a kosher-style restaurant that was located next to First Avenue back when the nightclub was a bus depot. By the 1980s there were 16 Brotherses around the metro, and they were famous for their bakery goods.

According to Jeff Burstein, the restaurants were quite a hive of accomplishment: In about 1965, the president of McDonald's visited and was so impressed with the Burstein family applesauce doughnuts that he flew the brothers out to San Bernardino to the Ray Kroc ranch, where the two were offered stewardship of some bakeries that were affiliated with McDonald's at the time.

Then, in 1968, Len Burstein invented the box lunch. "He loved his work, my dad," remembers Burstein. "He'd walk in once a week and say, 'I've got an idea!' Then we'd take the discussion to the dinner table and talk it over. One day I'm a kid, I'm sitting on the couch, he comes in: 'I've got an idea! What we'll do is, put a brownie, a pickle, a sandwich, and potato salad in there.' The next week we got the boxes printed. He knew downtown people wanted lunch fast, in and out quick as possible."

I think these are good stories. The one about McDonald's almost causes dizzying cultural vertigo when you look out the new Brothers' window and see current McDonald's-controlled darling Chipotle Grill; the one about box lunches makes me think of the Wright Brothers, tinkering with their bold invention, while a half-century later the Burstein Brothers tinkered with theirs: "No, what are you, crazy? You can't put a pickle and a brownie in there! The whole thing'll blow sky-high!" Well doggum it, who'd a thunk...

By 1983 the original Burstein boys were in declining health, and so the Brothers' chain was sold. Five years later it was shut down entirely, decimating pastrami availability in the Twin Cities. Jeff Burstein doesn't like to talk about it. "It was horrible for the family," he says. "Horrible, horrible. The restaurants had been such a source of pride for so long. Well, what can you say? It was hard."

In 1993 Jeff Burstein decided that he'd start a new deli from scratch. He went and apprenticed at the Carnegie Deli in New York, and the rest is history. Last fall he moved his operation to the new Dorsey building, near Sixth Street South and Nicollet Mall, and went about serving the best pastrami and corned-beef sandwiches in town. What does that mean? Well, it's just that some people have a bone-deep passion and interest in a good sandwich, and they pursue the perfection of it with a talent and attention to detail that everyone else is too lazy or sane to approach.