A 15-minute wait for a table on a Tuesday night is just business as usual these days at Kenny & Ziggy's New York Delicatessen, the 27-year-old Houston institution that owner Ziggy Gruber says has more customers than ever before. The deli's menu alone stretches two and a half feet long, offering everything from Hungarian goulash and stuffed cabbage to Chinese chicken salad, sashimi salad, and towering pastrami sandwiches.
Gruber, the sole owner of the delicatessen, told Chron that the restaurant's customer base has grown substantially since it opened in 1999, when Kenny Friedman sought Gruber out to bring an authentic New York-style deli to Houston. Gruber, a graduate of culinary school in England with years of experience running restaurants, said the deli's menu stays varied on purpose so that any diner can find something they want to eat. The restaurant now offers breakfast, lunch, and dinner, blending traditional New York deli food with more contemporary dishes, and it can accommodate parties of 10 or 20 people at a time.
The deli left its original address at 2327 Post Oak Boulevard in 2022, relocating about half a mile away into a former Luby's cafeteria space. According to CultureMap Houston, the original Post Oak strip mall was slated for demolition, prompting the move into a building with 300 main dining seats, a 100-seat private room, a cocktail bar, and two covered patios. The new location at 1743 Post Oak Blvd. now has more than twice as much seating as the original spot, and Gruber has described the reborn restaurant as feeling like a social club where everyone knows each other.
A Menu Built to Please Everyone
The sprawling menu includes shareable noshes, sandwiches, soups, stacked burgers, and smoked bagelwiches alongside deli standards like corned beef sandwiches. The Ziggalicious Burger, made from a special blend of short ribs and skirt steak ground by Pat LaFrieda, comes piled with pastrami, aged Swiss cheese, Russian dressing, and coleslaw on a challah bun, served with crispy fries. For dessert, the onsite bakery turns out giant cookies, pies, cakes, and the restaurant's Famous Torte, a combination of cheesecake, chocolate mousse, and an Oreo crust.
Kenny & Ziggy's also leans on New York sourcing to keep its food authentic, with fish flown in daily from New York and hand-sliced in house, along with other ingredients shipped in from the same region. The deli ships its food nationwide and has built a following well beyond Houston, with fans in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. Diners are also greeted with complimentary pickles and can sit beneath walls lined with Broadway playbills and celebrity caricatures, alongside a soda fountain and full-service bar.
Gruber's connection to deli culture runs three generations deep. His grandfather, Max Gruber, emigrated from Hungary and co-founded The Rialto Deli in 1927, according to Kenny & Ziggy's, marking the first delicatessen to open on Broadway in New York City. That lineage helped make Ziggy Gruber the central subject of the 2015 documentary “Deli Man,” directed by Erik Greenberg Anjou, which explored the cultural history and preservation of traditional Jewish delicatessens across North America, per Cohen Media Group.
A Shifting Clientele in a Shrinking Industry
When Kenny & Ziggy's first opened, its clientele was about 70 percent Jewish; today that figure has flipped, with the restaurant's customers now about 70 percent non-Jewish. That shift mirrors a broader decline across the industry: figures cited around the 2015 release of “Deli Man” showed the number of authentic Jewish delicatessens in North America fell from more than 1,500 in New York City alone during the 1930s to somewhere between 120 and 150 across the entire continent, according to Spirituality & Practice.
Gruber has worked to keep deli traditions alive even as the customer base changes, co-founding National Delicatessen Month in 2016 alongside New York deli owner Jay Parker. The annual August campaign, noted by the Jewish Herald-Voice, donates 10 percent of proceeds from select menu items to Holocaust Museum Houston and includes participating delis across the United States and Canada.
The Post Oak Boulevard location isn't the deli's only Houston chapter. Kenny & Ziggy's previously ran a second, 2,500-square-foot satellite spot on Buffalo Speedway in West University from 2016 until it closed permanently in late 2020 during the pandemic, according to the Houston Chronicle. Since then, the deli has consolidated its operations into the larger Post Oak building, where it has gained a reputation across Texas and the country as one of the best delicatessens around.
