RUTHFULLY YOURS

WHEN a Jewish deli decides to stop serving salami, something is wrong in the cosmos.

At Saul’s Restaurant and Deli in Berkeley, Calif., the eggs are organic and cage free, and the ground beef in the stuffed cabbage is grass fed. Its owners, Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt, yanked salami from the menu in November, saying that they could no longer in good conscience serve commercial kosher salami.

“It’s industrially produced meat that gets blessed by a rabbi,” said Mr. Levitt, who came to Saul’s two decades ago from Chez Panisse, just down the street. “We all know that isn’t good enough.”

The two are still trying to find, or make, salami that will align with their vision of the deli of the future: individual, sustainable, affordable and ethical.

New delis, with small menus, passionate owners and excellent pickles and pastrami, are rising up and rewriting the menu of the traditional Jewish deli, saying that it must change, or die. For some of them, the main drawback is the food itself, not its ideological underpinnings.

So, places like the three-month-old Mile End in Brooklyn; Caplansky’s in Toronto; Kenny & Zuke’s in Portland, Ore.; and Neal’s Deli in Carrboro, N.C., have responded to the low standard of most deli food — huge sandwiches of indifferent meat, watery chicken soup and menus thick with shtick — by moving toward delicious handmade food with good ingredients served with respect for past and present.

“I have a dream of a multiplicity of pastramis,” said Ken Gordon, a co-owner of Kenny & Zuke’s, one of a handful of delis in the country where the pastrami is smoked over hardwood. It opened in 2007, an outgrowth of the “barbecue nights” that Mr. Gordon used to hold at his French bistro. (He closed it to devote himself full time to bialys and corned beef.)

“A hundred delis, with a hundred different recipes,” he said. “That’s how it is for pizza — why not pastrami?”

These new deli owners are bringing a high set of culinary standards to once-plebeian food. They are mashing local potatoes to make peppery hand-wrapped knishes; holding tastings to determine the most savory fat for chopped liver (Mr. Gordon says that butter, the nonkosher choice, tastes best); and even brewing zippy homemade celery tonic — to reduce the carbon footprint, to save on the shipping from Brooklyn and because it simply tastes more like tradition.

“When people taste something special, they know the difference,” said Allan Gerovitz, a Brooklyn real estate broker who was lunching on matzo ball soup at Mile End last week. “You can’t get that at the Second Avenue Deli,” he said, pointing out thick spears of chicken, celery and carrot, and sprigs of dill that were barely contained by the bowl.

Noah Bernamoff, the chef and owner of Mile End, dropped out of Brooklyn Law School to open the deli, which is in the Boerum Hill neighborhood. “Other ethnicities have reinvented their comfort food, their grandmothers’ recipes, and made great restaurants,” Mr. Bernamoff said. “Where is ours?”

At Mile End, the beef salami is, in fact, house-made — from a custom blend of brisket and short rib sold by the star butcher Pat LaFrieda, no less. Other neo-retro delis are taking the creamy mayonnaise out of coleslaw and potato salad recipes, returning them to their vinegary Eastern European roots. It goes almost without saying that almost everybody is making their own pickles — not just dills and half-sours but green tomato, to round out the authentic (and free) bowl that deli mavens expect to see on the table. One has even tried house-made mustard, but he couldn’t keep up with demand.

“I had no idea how much mustard people eat in New York,” said Mr. Bernamoff, who grew up in Montreal, where the Jewish deli tradition centers on smoked meat, the Canadian answer to pastrami.

These cooks are fighting — independently, but with similar weapons of salt, smoke and fat — to rescue the Jewish deli, an institution that has been deteriorating in numbers and quality for decades.

“The old-school places are closing faster than I can write about them” said David Sax, the author of “Save the Deli,” a 2009 history of, and guide to, the remaining authentic Jewish delis in North America.

By today’s standards, the classic deli’s food is strikingly unhealthful, its vast menu financially unmanageable and its ingredients no longer in tune with the seasonal products of local farmers. Too many shortcuts are taken: sourdough bread instead of rye, prepared blintzes, lax lox.

“Jewish cooks weren’t immune to what happened to food after World War II,” Mr. Sax said. “The powders and jars, convenience food — all of that helped lower the standard.”

In the 1950s, when postwar wealth and a push for assimilation carried many Jews into American suburbs, Jewish food became less distinct: the delis grew bigger and more ornate, and so did the sandwiches. The authentic delis that were left behind in cities often had to adapt; most of them, he said, have now closed.

Mr. Bernamoff, his eyes burning with the fervor of a new deli convert (he is 27 and has never worked in a restaurant before), said that “there is no excuse for a lot of what is served as deli now.”

“When I see tourists going into Katz’s, I feel a kind of rage,” he continued. “This is the food of my people, and places like that are turning it into a joke.”

(Later, in a calmer frame of mind, Mr. Bernamoff allowed that the pastrami at Katz’s is “pretty good.”)

One bite of Mile End’s Ruth Wilensky sandwich proves definitively that handmade food wins out. It is an homage to — some might say a copy of —a famous Montreal sandwich, the Wilensky’s Special. Ruth Wilensky is the matriarch of the family that owns Wilensky’s Light Lunch, a classic deli that once served a full menu, now pared down to just a single menu item: beef salami, bologna and mustard compressed between the griddled halves of an onion-sprinkled roll. Asking for “no mustard” used to cost an extra nickel; now, mustard is compulsory.

The Ruth Wilensky; the pastrami biscuit at Neal’s Deli in Carrboro, N.C.; and the Jimmy’s Special (a Reuben sandwich in which bread is replaced by peppery potato latkes) at Jimmy & Drew’s 28th Street Deli in Boulder, Colo., provide a taste of what a great modern deli — both neo and retro — might serve.

If anything can save the deli single-handedly, it’s pastrami. A Romanian-Jewish-American hybrid of barbecue, basturma (Turkish dried, spiced meat) and corned beef, it is loved by pit masters, salumieri and chefs alike.

Mr. Gordon, of Kenny & Zuke’s in Portland, who grew up in Queens, graduated from La Varenne cooking school in France and cooked French food for 30 years before returning to the meaty tastes of his childhood, smokes 2,500 pounds of pastrami a week. “Once I settled down in Portland, Ore., I realized that if I wanted to eat pastrami, I was going to have to make it myself,” he said.

Pastrami, traditionally made from a fatty cut of beef belly called the navel, is not easy to master. It must be brined for days or even weeks, rubbed, smoked, steamed and sliced at the peak of juiciness. The seasonings — coriander, black pepper, salt, sugar, sometimes cumin or fennel seed — must sing in harmony. At each step, attentiveness is required: to the shape of the piece, its fat content and the tendons that run through it. Great slicers have become the stuff of legend: Katz’s and Langer’s, in Los Angeles, are among the only old-school delis that do it by hand. Some feel strongly that the slices should be thick; others, cold-cut thin.

All this means that pastrami fits right into two major contemporary food cults: traditional cured meats and barbecue. Modern cooks are so enamored of meat that even those with no particular connection to delis — like Tom Mylan, of the Meat Hook in Brooklyn; Elizabeth Falkner, of Orson in San Francisco; and Amorette Casaus, of Ardesia in Midtown — now make their own small-batch versions. Jake Dickson, of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Chelsea, has developed a spicy lamb version; housemade pastrami pork belly is on the menu at the elegant Aureole in Midtown; and pastrami-style tongue has been spotted at Marlow & Daughters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Mich., collaborated with the all-natural meat producer Niman Ranch on Niman’s pastrami, which delis across the country (like Saul’s in Berkeley) bring in-house, and then steam to their specifications. The pastrami at Zingerman’s is made from Black Angus beef, by Sy Ginsberg of United Meat and Deli in Detroit.

“Doing handmade, traditional food is not easy; you have to keep moving forward, making it better,” said Mr. Weinzweig, who opened Zingerman’s in 1982 and has expanded it into an empire with a creamery (where cream cheese is made by hand) and bakery (where the rye bread for sandwiches is long risen and naturally leavened). “I would be embarrassed today to serve the rye bread we used in 1982.”

Pastrami has even caused one scion of a notable Southern food family to open a deli in tiny Carrboro, N.C., a place not noted for its Jewish traditions. “I remember the first time my dad took me to the Second Avenue Deli,” said Matt Neal, a North Carolina native whose father, the late chef Bill Neal, was a leader in the Southern-food revival of the 1980s.

Matt Neal, with his wife, Sheila, opened Neal’s Deli in 2008, a deli “in the urban and European tradition,” where he makes pastrami in a refrigerator-size smoker, serving it with sides like vinegar-softened coleslaw and local beets spiked with horseradish. Still, “We don’t pretend to be a Jewish deli, or a New York deli,” he said. “This is just the kind of good, real food I decided I wanted to eat for lunch every day.”

Whether North Carolina pastrami can be truly good and truly real is the kind of question that the residents of Berkeley seem to thrive on. In February, in response to the public furor over the Saul’s salami boycott, Ms. Adelman organized a “Referendum on the Jewish Deli,” with the sustainability guru Michael Pollan, a regular at the restaurant, on the panel.

Many deli die-hards were present, the kind of people who have found Saul’s matzo brei with green garlic and mission figs to be a poor substitute for salami and eggs.

“When I go to a deli, it’s because I don’t want to think about local or sustainable or fattening,” said Karen Rosenthal, a lawyer in the Bay Area who attended.

Rewriting the deli menu, it seems, is rife with pitfalls. Ms. Adelman said: “Everyone feels like they own this cuisine. It’s connected to nostalgia, to comfort, to religion.”

Mr. Levitt pointed out that the much-mourned death of the deli has partly been caused by the very centerpiece of its menu. “Large, cheap meat sandwiches are a losing proposition for any restaurant,” he said. Not to mention that pastrami and corned beef use exactly one small cut of an entire animal. (Some places are working on pickling their own beef tongue, but no results yet.)

“There’s no such thing as a nose-to-tail deli,” he said. “Even in Berkeley.”