The nation's best pastrami? Find it at Langer's Deli, this year's L.A. Times Gold Award winner

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Set us as preferred It’s just before the midweek lunch rush at Langer’s Deli and owner Norm Langer is behind the already-busy sandwich counter inspecting a stack of newly sliced rye bread.With him is Jaime Castaneda, a longtime manager, trusted counterman and one of the secret weapons Langer deploys to ensure the deli’s famous pastrami is hand-cut with speed and precision.“It doesn’t happen without me,” says Langer.

“But it also doesn’t happen without him.”“That’s teamwork,” chimes in Castaneda, who has worked at Langer’s for 43 years.Or 44 years.

The two go back and forth on the detail.“I started working here when I was 3 years old,” Castaneda says with a grin before turning to the hunk of hot pastrami he’s placed on a cutting board.

Gripping a knife in one hand and a carving fork in the other, he swiftly slices through the meat, each rosy, pepper-edged piece beautifully aligned with the next like a blackjack dealer’s gracefully fanned deck of cards.1 2 1.

Norm Langer, right, and trusted manager Jaime Castaneda.(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times) 2.

Castaneda hand-slicing pastrami.(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times) But about that bread.

Langer is not pleased.“It’s all this hot weather,” he says of the recent L.A.heat wave.

“You’ve got air-conditioning fans on at the bakery so the air blows on the dough during proofing.It gets a skin on it.”“Taste it,” he says, handing over a slice.

“The flavor’s there.It eats right.

It bites right.But see what I mean?” He tears at a slice.

“It’s a little bit stretchy.It’s a little bit rough.” “If I let it go ...

if I don’t jump up and down, I don’t know what I’m going to get tomorrow.”Norm Langer rarely lets anything go.Neither did his late father, Al Langer, who in 1947, with his wife, Jean, opened La...