Best Pastrami in Columbus (2026)

A deli earns its keep on the strength of the roast beef and turkey, not on the room, and The Brown Bag Deli passes that test on the strength of the sandwich alone. The build reads as classic counter deli: sliced meats, straightforward assembly, nothing fussy layered on top of it, which is exactly the standard a sandwich this size needs to meet and does. Regulars who have logged decades of sandwich shops elsewhere still rank it well, which says more than any single order could; that kind of comparison only comes from people who have eaten the format enough to know when a kitchen is cutting corners on the meat-to-bread ratio. This one is not.

It runs small and busy, a quick-turn counter operation rather than a sit-down deli, which suits the lunch crowd it serves and the German Village foot traffic passing through. Pricing sits in the moderate range, appropriate for a sandwich shop rather than a restaurant charging for atmosphere it does not have. What The Brown Bag Deli offers instead is consistency: a short roster of straightforward sandwiches executed at the level a longtime sandwich eater notices and appreciates. In a neighborhood dense with sausage houses, reubens, and supper-club steak rooms, a deli this unpretentious and this competent fills a real gap. It is not trying to be Katzinger's. It does not need to be.

It runs small and busy, a quick-turn counter operation rather than a sit-down deli, which suits the lunch crowd it serves and the German Village foot traffic passing through. Pricing sits in the moderate range, appropriate for a sandwich shop rather than a restaurant charging for atmosphere it does not have. What The Brown Bag Deli offers instead is consistency: a short roster of straightforward sandwiches executed at the level a longtime sandwich eater notices and appreciates. In a neighborhood dense with sausage houses, reubens, and supper-club steak rooms, a deli this unpretentious and this competent fills a real gap.

Katzinger's has run the New York deli standard in German Village since 1984, and the sandwich case still carries the weight. The corned beef comes stacked to the point where the fork becomes optional equipment; the pastrami holds its own against anyone's memory of a Manhattan counter. Both arrive on bread sturdy enough to survive the pile, which is the actual test a deli sandwich has to pass. The pickle barrel is the other half of the reputation: a full spread of them, sour to half-sour, set out as if the kitchen wants to prove the fermentation before the meat even shows up.

The menu runs longer than a corned beef sandwich would suggest, with a vegan section that signals this is not a museum piece frozen in 1984, and that range matters in a room that draws a crowd on weekends. German Village earns its name through brick storefronts and a preserved nineteenth-century street grid, and Katzinger's sits inside that fabric on Kossuth Street as one of the neighborhood's working institutions rather than a stop on a tour. The room reads as counter-order deli built for volume: order at the counter, expect a line at peak hours, expect the room to fill with families and groups who treat this as a standing lunch decision rather than an occasion. Pricing lands in the moderate range, appropriate for a sandwich that requires two hands and a plan.

What distinguishes Katzinger's from a merely competent corned beef stop is consistency: the sandwich reads the same whether the visit lands on a quiet Tuesday or a packed Saturday, and that reliability is the real deli standard, more than any single ingredient. It is not fine dining and does not pretend otherwise; it is a deli doing deli work at a level that holds up against the city it's imitating.