Has the storied Carnegie Deli slung its last corned beef?
Shuttered since the discovery of an illegal gas hookup in April, the restaurant has no reopening date.
Unemployment insurance for the deli’s 70 or so workers is about to run out, and tenants living above the Seventh Avenue eatery have been without heat, hot water and gas for cooking.
One longtime Carnegie waitress fumed that the pastrami purveyor continued to haul in cash through related ventures, like a New Jersey wholesale business, while workers are suffering through lean times.
“If you have a restaurant that makes the money that that restaurant makes, you should have people working there 24 hours a day fixing it, but they don’t,” the waitress said.
Marian Harper Levine, the president of Carnegie Deli, insisted that she remained committed to serving the signature overstuffed sandwiches again on Seventh Avenue. The restaurant, which opened in 1937, has been called the most famous deli in America.
“Unfortunately, we do not have a clear date of reopening at this time and had expected to reopen this month,” Harper Levine said in a statement. “There was a setback in a recent inspection where more work was required to bring the Carnegie Deli up to code.”
She refused to elaborate.
The city Buildings Department said it can’t issue any approvals to reopen until the deli passes a “gas authorization test” and that the restaurant had not done that test.
‘If you have a restaurant that makes the money that [Carnegie Deli] makes, you should have people working there 24 hours a day fixing it, but they don’t’
- a waitress
Con Edison said it was waiting for city approval before it does its own tests and turns on the gas.
“It’s been very difficult because [of] all these violations; it was the company’s fault,” said Gilbert Palacios of Unite Here Local 100, which represents 50 Carnegie servers, counter workers and others.
Con Edison found the illegal gas connection in April when it was called to investigate a possible gas leak. The discovery came a month after a gas explosion leveled an East Village building and killed two people.
Harper Levine and her husband, Sanford, were in the midst of a bitter divorce when the restaurant closed. Sandy Levine, as he is known, was cheating on his wife with a deli waitress, whom Harper Levine accused of stealing the recipe for the deli’s famed cheesecake and even sending food to a knockoff restaurant in Thailand.
Levine managed the deli business for years, prompting a Manhattan judge hearing the divorce to blame him for the gas fiasco, calling him the Shyster of Smoked Meat. The judge also noted a recent $2.65 million settlement to 25 Carnegie Deli workers in a lawsuit over wage theft.
“Somebody did something to these gas pipes that would have caused people to die for the sake of making some bucks,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper said during an August hearing.
Levine appeared in court in September, settling the divorce just days before he was to take the stand and prove he wasn’t responsible for the illegal gas connection.
There is a pending federal lawsuit against the deli seeking $73,822 owed to an employee retirement fund from 2010 through 2013.
Tenants living upstairs from the deli haven’t had to pay rent during the shutdown, but can’t cook or take hot showers.