Zingerman's Deli Is the Most Important Restaurant in Ann Arbor. It Might Also Be the Most Misunderstood.
Forty-four years after opening in a 900-square-foot grocery building on Detroit Street, the Deli remains the anchor of everything Zingerman's became. But it's not a museum piece. It's a working deli that still makes tens of thousands of Reubens a year.
The line starts before the door. On a Saturday morning in March, it snakes past the hand-lettered sandwich boards, along the brick sidewalk of Detroit Street, and sometimes around the corner toward the Farmers Market. People stand in the cold holding paper menus, studying the numbered sandwiches like they're choosing a course of study. Some of them drove from Detroit. Some of them flew in from farther. And some of them live three blocks away and do this every week.
I have eaten at Zingerman's Deli more times than I can count, across more than a decade. I have stood in that line in August heat and January wind. I have eaten the #2 Reuben at the counter, on the patio, in my car, and standing in the parking lot because every seat was taken. I have brought out-of-town friends here as a kind of proof: this is what Ann Arbor is. This is the best we've got.
And I've watched people walk out confused, holding a $19 sandwich, wondering what the fuss was about. I understand both reactions. Zingerman's Deli is the most written-about, most visited, most nationally recognized food establishment in Ann Arbor. It is also the most misunderstood. People come expecting a deli. What they find is something harder to categorize.
The Building
The Deli occupies a building at the corner of Detroit Street and Kingsley, in the Kerrytown district on Ann Arbor's north side. The original structure was built in 1902 as Disderide's Grocery. When Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw opened the Deli here on March 15, 1982, the space was roughly 900 square feet: pressed tin ceilings, black-and-white tile floor, five tables, and four stools at the window counter.
It has grown since then. A 700-square-foot addition in 1986 expanded the sandwich line. Zingerman's Next Door, a coffee and pastry annex, opened in 1991. The building now sprawls across what feels like several connected rooms at slightly different levels, with a covered patio out back and a retail section stacked floor to ceiling with olive oils, vinegars, cheeses, bread, candy, coffee, and imported goods. The original room is still there if you know where to look. The tin ceiling is still there. But the operation around it has scaled in every direction.
The location matters. Kerrytown is not downtown Ann Arbor. It's a few blocks north, across Huron Street, in a neighborhood anchored by the Ann Arbor Farmers Market and the Kerrytown Market & Shops. The streets are brick. The buildings are old. Monahan's Seafood Market is steps away. The whole area has a Saturday-morning-market energy that persists even on weekdays. The Deli fits here in a way it wouldn't fit on Main Street or State Street. It belongs to this neighborhood, and the neighborhood belongs, in part, to it.
March 15, 1982
Today is March 14, 2026. Tomorrow, the Deli turns 44.
The founding story has been told many times, including in my earlier piece on the Zingerman's ecosystem. The short version: Weinzweig, a University of Michigan history graduate from Chicago, and Saginaw, a restaurant manager from Detroit, met while working at Maude's, a local restaurant that no longer exists. Both had grown up in cities with great delis and missed having one in Ann Arbor. They secured a $20,000 bank loan. The restaurant's lore has it that they wanted to call it Greenberg's, but the name was taken. As the founding story goes, they picked the name from the phone book — Z for last in the listings, first in memorability. Whether that's exactly how it happened depends on which co-founder you ask. They opened with a short menu and two people behind the counter.
What they built in those early years was a deli that treated ingredients the way fine-dining restaurants did. The Deli's own history credits Sy Ginsburg of United Meat and Deli with helping them develop their own corned beef recipe. They sourced rye bread that met their standards (and when they couldn't find bread good enough, they eventually opened the Bakehouse to make their own). They stocked imported cheeses, olive oils, and vinegars at a time when most delis in the Midwest were running on Sysco deliveries. The food was better than it had to be. The prices reflected that. Both facts remain true 44 years later.
By the early 1990s, the Deli was nationally known. Food writers made pilgrimages. The 1994 decision not to franchise and instead build a community of distinct businesses in Ann Arbor (I wrote about this at length in The Zingerman's Effect) turned a successful deli into the seed of something much larger. But the Deli itself never stopped being the center. Every business in the Zingerman's Community of Businesses connects back to this building on Detroit Street, to a counter where someone is slicing corned beef right now.
The Sandwiches
The menu runs to roughly 100 numbered sandwiches, plus specials, soups, salads, and a retail operation that could fill its own article. But the sandwiches are the point. They are what people come for, what people argue about, and what people remember.
#2 Zingerman's Reuben. Corned beef, Swiss Emmental, sauerkraut from The Brinery, Russian dressing, on grilled Jewish Rye from the Bakehouse. This is the sandwich. The Deli makes tens of thousands of them a year. Food & Wine has included it on best-sandwich lists. It was the sandwich served at the 25th anniversary street fair in 2007, when the Deli claims more than three thousand Reubens sold to thousands of visitors. It costs around $19.
The Reuben works because nothing in it is generic. The corned beef is Zingerman's own recipe, brined and spiced to their specifications. The rye is Bakehouse rye, the same bread I wrote about in my Bakehouse piece: dense, caraway-studded, with a crust that gives way to a tight, slightly sour crumb. The sauerkraut comes from The Brinery, a local fermentation operation in Ann Arbor. The Russian dressing is made in-house. When you stack all of that on a grill and press it, the result is a Reuben that tastes layered in a way that a deli using commodity ingredients cannot replicate.
Is it the best sandwich I've ever eaten? I don't know. Is it the best Reuben? Probably. I've had Reubens at Katz's in New York and at delis in Chicago and Montreal. Zingerman's holds up. The corned beef has more depth, the bread has more character, and the whole thing arrives with a structural integrity that lesser Reubens lack. You pick it up and it stays together. That sounds minor until you've eaten a Reuben that fell apart in your hands.
#1 Who's Greenberg Anyway? Corned beef with chopped liver, leaf lettuce, and Russian dressing on rye. The name references the deli that almost was. The chopped liver adds a richness that makes this heavier than the Reuben but rewarding in a different way. I order it less often but think about it more.
#48 Binny's Brooklyn Reuben. The pastrami variation: Zingerman's pastrami, Swiss Emmental, Brinery sauerkraut, Russian dressing, on grilled pumpernickel from the Bakehouse. Around $19. If the #2 is the classic, the #48 is the argument that pastrami on pumpernickel might be better. I go back and forth. The pastrami has a smokier, more peppery profile than the corned beef, and the pumpernickel gives the whole sandwich a darker, earthier quality. On any given visit, I'll order whichever one I didn't have last time.
The rest of the menu runs wide. Turkey sandwiches, chicken salad, vegetarian options, a Georgia Reuben made with turkey. The sandwiches are built to order at a counter you can watch, and the portions are substantial. A sandwich, a pickle, and a cup of soup is a full meal.
The Price Question
Sandwiches at Zingerman's Deli run roughly $17 to $23. That is expensive for a deli sandwich. It is the first thing skeptics mention and the last thing regulars care about.
I've had this argument enough times to know where both sides stand. The skeptic says: it's a sandwich. Bread, meat, condiments. No sandwich is worth $19. The regular says: taste it. Taste the corned beef. Taste the bread. Then go eat a $9 deli sandwich somewhere else and tell me it's the same thing.
Both positions have merit, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Twenty dollars is a lot for lunch. If you're feeding a family of four, a Zingerman's visit is an $80 meal before you add soup or drinks. That's real money. The Deli has never been cheap, and the prices have climbed steadily over the years, tracking the cost of the ingredients and the labor required to make everything from scratch or source it from small producers.
What I'll say is this: the gap between a Zingerman's sandwich and an average deli sandwich is larger than the gap between a $19 steak and a $50 steak at two different restaurants. The quality difference is not marginal. It is fundamental. Whether that difference justifies the price is a personal decision I'm not going to make for you. But the difference is real, and anyone who tells you it isn't hasn't been paying attention to what they're eating.
Beyond the Counter
The Deli is not just a sandwich shop. The retail operation is a store unto itself. Shelves hold Bakehouse breads, Creamery cheeses, Coffee Company beans, Candy Manufactory chocolates and Zzang! Bars. There are imported olive oils I've spent too much money on, vinegars aged longer than some of the customers, mustards, pickles, jams, salsas, and a cheese case that could keep you browsing for 20 minutes.
This is where the Deli functions as a gateway to the rest of the Zingerman's universe. You come for a Reuben. You leave with a bag of coffee, a loaf of Farm Bread, a tin of toffee, and a bottle of olive oil. The retail side is not an afterthought. It's a curated (I use that word here because it's actually accurate) collection of products that the Deli has sourced, tested, and chosen to stand behind. The staff can tell you about any of it. Ask about an olive oil and you'll get the region, the producer, the harvest. They train for this.
Then there's Zingerman's Mail Order, which launched in 1992 when someone at the Deli asked "Can you ship this?" and Mo Frechette, an early employee, is credited with packing some of the first orders in the basement. Mail Order is now the largest business in the Zingerman's community by revenue. Almost half of that comes in the seven weeks before Christmas and Hanukkah. The Reuben kit is the flagship product: corned beef, rye bread, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and Russian dressing, packed and shipped to your door. It is the Deli, disassembled and reassembled in someone's kitchen in Portland or Dallas or wherever the box lands.
The Illustration Style
I want to mention something that most food writing about Zingerman's skips. The hand-lettered signs. They're everywhere in the Deli: on the sandwich boards, above the counter, on the retail shelves, in the mail order catalogs. The style is dense, illustrated, slightly chaotic, and immediately recognizable. Steve Muno, an early employee, helped develop the approach. Ian Nagy became the resident illustrator in the early 1990s.
This visual language became Zingerman's brand identity long before anyone used the phrase "brand identity." And it influenced Ann Arbor's food culture beyond Zingerman's. Chalkboard menus, hand-drawn signage, illustrated packaging at bakeries and cafes across the city owe a debt to what Muno and Nagy built. In 2024, the Ann Arbor District Library hosted an exhibit of Nagy's work, which tells you something about how far the influence reached.
What the Deli Means
Every piece in this series has ended with some version of the same observation: Zingerman's businesses are quiet infrastructure, production operations that feed quality into Ann Arbor's food ecosystem. The Bakehouse supplies bread. The Creamery supplies cheese. The Coffee Company supplies beans. All true. But the Deli is different. The Deli is not quiet. It is the loudest, most visible, most public-facing part of the entire community.
The Deli is where people encounter Zingerman's for the first time. It's where tourists come. It's where University of Michigan parents eat on move-in weekend. It's what people mean when they say "Zingerman's" without specifying which business. And because of that, it carries a weight that the other businesses don't. It has to be the proof of concept. Every sandwich, every interaction with a staff member, every $19 Reuben has to justify not just the price but the premise: that a deli in a college town in Michigan can operate at a level that competes with anywhere in the country.
Forty-four years in, the premise holds. The Deli is not coasting on reputation. The corned beef is still made to their own recipe. The bread still comes from the Bakehouse. The staff still trains with an intensity that most restaurants reserve for fine dining. The line still forms on Saturday mornings, stretching down Detroit Street, past the hand-lettered signs, full of people who either already know or are about to find out.
I've covered the Bakehouse, the Creamery, the Candy Manufactory, and the Coffee Company. All of them are good. All of them matter. But this is the one. This is where it started, on a brick corner in Kerrytown, in a building from 1902, with a $20,000 loan and a name that, as the story goes, was picked from the phone book. Everything else grew from here.
Zingerman's Delicatessen is at 422 Detroit St, Ann Arbor. Open daily, 11 a.m.--7 p.m.