M&L Market Still Makes You Follow the Rules for a Pastrami Sandwich

Jonathan Kauffman

M&L Market's turkey-pastrami sandwich. This is a half sandwich ($4.20), by the way.

​ There are three constants about the line at M&L Market, a tiny deli on 14th Street and Market that has been quietly famous for as long as I've lived in San Francisco. Number one: There will be at least one uniformed SFPD officer ahead of you. Number two: The conversation dominating the line -- which usually stretches all the way to the back, and often back around again -- will be about the Giants, unless it is about the Niners. And three: Someone will be fretting out loud about about remembering Judy and May's rules for ordering sandwiches.

The rules are simple: Bread first! Type of sandwich next, followed by toppings, cheese, and whether or not you want to eat it at one of the three tables or take it to go. The sandwiches are simple, too, ranging from peanut butter, banana, and honey to the sandwich everyone actually orders: the pastrami.

Luis C./Yelp

M&L Market: same as it always was.

​Yet when you've done your half-hour in line and make it to the counter, peering between two loaves of bread at Judy, it's hard not to get intimidated. She's mellowed out at the years, but I've heard her yell "Have you read the rules?" at too many people). Before Judy took over, the white-haired, helium-voiced May, her mother, made the sandwiches, terrifying the uninitiated who got the order wrong and delighting the gay men who make up a third of the market's clientele. (A friend tells me he once saw her shake her knife at a policeman who didn't know how to order.) Back curled and eyes bright, May now works the cash register, slipping an almond cookie into every bag.

When I returned to San Francisco from four years in Seattle, the market had taken one of its many months-long breaks, and so last week was my first visit to M&L for many years. The soda cooler isn't as packed, the gewgaws behind the counter have gathered a little more dust, but the pastrami-turkey sandwich (a half, $4.20, is enough for me these days) hadn't changed. Shaved lettuce exploded out of the bread (Light rye first! I didn't screw up), and the half sandwich was filled with curls of lightly-spiced beef, wide stripes of fat half-melted in the steamer.

When I called M&L this morning to ask some background questions for this post, Judy politely refused to talk to me. "We've been here for 31 years," she said. "We're pretty established." So all my questions about a sandwich I've now been enjoying for 20 years -- who first devised the rice-cooker method for heating up pastrami? What happened to Judy's daughter, who used to work behind the counter? Is there a schedule to the market's long closures? -- will go unanswered until I make it back in line. Or perhaps I should call the SFPD. One of the officers will surely know.

M&L Market: 691 14th St. (at Market), 431-7044. Lunch only.