They’re calling it “pastrami on cry”: after nearly eight decades of serving 4in-high sandwiches to hungry New Yorkers and tourists, the Carnegie Deli has announced that it will close its doors at the end of 2016.  The Jewish delicatessen, open since 1937 and known for its gruff wait staff and massive sandwiches – its motto: “If you can finish your meal, we’ve done something wrong” – announced its impending closure in a Facebook post on Friday.  Speaking to staff in an emotional address, owner Marian Harper Levine said the stresses of running a restaurant in New York City had grown too much to bear.  “The restaurant business is one of the hardest jobs in New York City,” she said. “At this stage in my life, the early morning to late-night days have taken a toll, along with my sleepless nights and gruelling hours.”  On Seventh Avenue at West 55th, in midtown Manhattan and in the shadow of rising towers on “Billionaires’ Row”, the Carnegie is one of few businesses surviving from an era before rampant corporate investment and rising commercial rents. Recently, though, times have been hard.  In 2014, the deli’s owners were ordered to pay a $2.65m settlement to 25 employees who alleged they had been cheated out of fair wages. Harper then went through a contentious divorce, in which she claimed her husband, Sandy Levine, had shared secret recipes with his girlfriend, whose family allegedly launched a “rogue” Carnegie Deli in Thailand.  From April 2015, the deli was closed for more than nine months after the utility firm Con Edison discovered an illegal gas line hookup that had been working for six years, similar to a hookup that caused an explosion in the East Village, killing two people and destroying Pommes Frites, another famous restaurant. A fine and a backdated utilities bill of more than $40,000 followed.  The only beef that mattered to the Carnegie’s customers, though, was the meat layered lovingly in its famous sandwiches.  For loyal regulars, news of the deli’s demise brought heartache. On Saturday, the top-ranked comment on the restaurant’s Facebook page said: “You’re literally a part of the fabric of NYC.”  “My kids will never know what it is like to see their first MASSIVE sandwich appear before them!” read another. “And the knishes! And chopped liver! Life will never be the same.”  The Carnegie owed some of its fame to an appearance in the 1984 Woody Allen film Broadway Danny Rose, in which it was the setting for the framing device, a discussion by kvetching Jewish comedians about the adventures of the titular character, a hapless talent manager played by the director himself.  After the Carnegie closes, anyone pining for pastrami on rye and matzoh ball soup with a side of silver-screen glamor will still be able to take a cab to Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, to have what Meg Ryan had in When Harry Met Sally.
Restaurant in shadow of Billionaires Row was setting for a Woody Allen masterpiece but legal beefs and business pressures grew too much for owner