When the North Shore Deli permanently closed its doors, a huge vacancy was left on Pittsburgh’s Ohio Street.

“There’s nowhere to really get sandwiches around here,” Cory Hughes, owner of local restaurants Fig & Ash and Fat Cat, tells TABLE Magazine. “We have Fat Cat, which is kind of like dine-in, but people were more looking for grab-and-go, and when we saw the space, we thought it’d be perfect for a deli.”

The space Hughes is referring to is the location of the former Coop Chicken & Waffles and soon-to-be Deutschtown Deli, Hughes’s latest venture in the Pittsburgh food scene. He says to expect a “straight-up old-school deli” when doors open in the next few weeks.

“We’re not going to reinvent the wheel here; it’s going to be a lot of hot pastrami on rye, kielbasa, club sandwiches, Italian hoagies, stuff like that.”

One key difference, however, is that Deutschtown Deli Chef Chris Kweder already has a pickling program in the works and plans to make pastrami from corned beef.

“We’re going to make us much in-house as we can,” Hughes says.

Kweder will also be debuting a sandwich called the Chip Chop Italian, which was successfully tested out at this year’s Deutschtown Music Fest.

“It’s basically a diced Italian sandwich, and it’s like every bite the same,” Hughes says. “That’s going to be a huge crowd-pleaser here.”

Story by Jordan Snowden

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