Look past the familiar at Katella Deli

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

It’s been decades since Katella Deli sliced through its first loaf of challah, but the scene inside the venerable restaurant hasn’t changed: parents with their arms wrapped around their kids, grandparents hugging tight alongside. That’s because Katella Deli is a family restaurant in the best possible way, a generational sort of place pinned to classics that bridge even 80-year age gaps. And, like most of the deli’s diners, you can eat through all those classics: meat folded in on itself and stuffed between fresh, seedless rye and matzo balls as dense as rocks. But shoved beneath all that are the pleasant surprises and forgotten favorites of a restaurant full of them.

Like its menu, Katella Deli’s interior doesn’t look like it’s been touched in years, still painted a pink-tinged taupe that’s paired with a shade of deep teal abandoned sometime during the 1980s. The walls of glass blocks and rows of plastic-potted plants only warp you back further in time. But by now, that’s the way it has to be—any other style would be completely distasteful.

The first food to catch your eye will forever and always be the sandwiches. If not for the quantity alone (there’s well over two dozen choices), then for the quality: meats freshly shaved off their respective hunks, breads still warm out of the oven. In fact, this is probably the single most classic flap of Katella Deli’s menu, where the Reuben and the Club and the Bronx Delight all congregate. For an excellent alternative to those oft-eaten mainstays, order the pastrami melt. The pastrami is remarkably lean, with only the thinnest ribbons of fat running through each slice. The melt, however, isn’t for the health-conscious—tomatoes and cheese squeezed in with the pastrami, pressed and grilled and served hot with your choice of sides.

Katella Deli is at its most accommodating when it comes to those sides, offering a pliable mix of just about everything on the menu. But it’s always best to add a side of onion rings, which are dredged in crumbs so light they’re practically panko. The result is crisp and airy, perfect alone, but sometimes made better by the accompanying barbeque sauce, a sweet dip so thick it clings to the rings with just the right amount of weight.

A good counter to all that heavy eating is the Cobb salad. Katella Deli’s Cobb is one of the best around: the bacon freshly chopped, the avocado scooped out in wedges, the egg and the chicken still warm atop the pile of greens. Best of all, the salad is big enough to last through multiple meals, a serving so unknowingly large that, if properly parceled, it could easily feed three. With the salad you can grab a brick of cornbread or a bran muffin, which, moist with honey and molasses, eats like a dessert.

And then there are the dishes that you wouldn’t normally order at a place like Katella Deli. The spaghetti is a surprisingly good meal, so too the cashew chicken. Better yet is the restaurant’s small selection of omelets. And while dishes like these certainly don’t overshadow the deli’s more famous offerings, they please with an inherent familiarity done right and ingredients as fresh as those available on the rest of the menu.

It’s not often that you find a restaurant as reliable and certain as Katella Deli. The fact that nothing changes isn’t obstinacy—it’s proof of quality. The service will always shift between hospitable and spiteful, and the food will always stay steady. It’s that fixed flow that my mom so lovingly hooked me on years ago, and that still drives me to pick up a chocolate chip Danish every time I stop through the bakery. It won’t take much to get hooked on Katella Deli. Then again, at a place so consistent, it shouldn’t.

KATELLA DELI 4470 KATELLA AVE | LOS ALAMITOS 90720 | 562.594.8611 | FOOD FOR TWO $20-30 | BEER, WINE

Tags: Food, katella deli, los alamitos