Old world Jewish noshes meet a new generation of cooking at Yans Deli

By the time Benji Greenberg decided to leave Joe Beef, he already knew what he wanted to cook: Something closer to home—if not in execution, then at least in spirit.

Yans Deli would decidedly not be another riff on fine dining, nor a redux of the lobster-and-steak era that had, in many ways, defined his seven-year run at the institution. What he had in mind was a new kind of Jewish deli that pulls equally from Romanian countryside recipes, childhood brunch memories, and the kind of ingredient obsession one could expect from someone who’s staged at Single Thread and CUT by Wolfgang Puck.

“It’s food that I know how to cook, food I love to eat,” Benji says. “I just said, fuck it. I’m gonna do it my way.”