Sammy’s NYC Deli & Grill
601 S. Main StreetOur trip to Lake Placid was always intended to take two days. We could have done the 11 hour drive in one day. I’ve done that plenty of times on my own, but we didn’t want to feel rushed or exhausted.
We made a stop for lunch at Taps Brewhouse in Niagara Falls, ON then did a quick stop by the actual falls themself. We made our way over the Rainbow Bridge (which was a really cool bridge) back in to the US then still had about a three hour drive to Syracuse.
When J and L did the drive to Lake Placid on their own last year, they made it all the way to Watertown, NY which is about an hour closer to the final destination. I found a really cheap Comfort Inn with two queen beds in Liverpool, NY just outside of Syracuse so that’s where we decided to stop for the night.
Earlier in the day, I gave the kids a choice. Did they want to stop for lunch at a brewery or a diner. To my surprise, they chose the brewery thinking we would hit the diner for dinner. The problem was, no one was really hungry when we got to our hotel.
L was though. She didn’t want to admit it but she asked if we were going to the diner. I said no because mom and B weren’t hungry. We’d do the diner for breakfast the next morning.
I told her I could find something else for her and I though. She was pretty non-committal but I did some looking around for a deli. I know she likes a good grilled cheese so I figured if I could find something quick and easy like that, she would admit to me she was hungry.
I ended up finding Sammy’s NYC Deli & Grill on South Main Street in North Syracuse. The small deli that has been in the North Syracuse neighborhood for about a year sits on the corner of Main and Melrose Drive in the southwest corner of the village. The owner comes to Syracuse after working in family deli’s in New York City for years. This building was actually a physical therapists office before being turned in to a New York City style bodega sandwich shop.
The menu at Sammy’s is massively huge. It was actually really, really overwhelming. Lucky for me, they have online ordering through DoorDash so I could take my time, sort through it, and get what I wanted. I don’t think there is anyway I would actually walk in to the shop and order because I would have such a hard time relaxing, reading the menu, and figuring out what I wanted. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because there are so many options and I’m guessing they are all delicious. It’s a bad thing for people like me who just pick the first thing I see instead of looking over all of it.
The centerpiece of the deli is the Chopped Cheese sandwich…a sandwich very popular in NYC bodegas. It’s essentially chopped beef, cheese, peppers, and onions all chopped together and served on a Hero roll. The meat and cheese part sounds delicious to me but not the veggies. I didn’t order that. I ordered a pastrami sandwich and fries for myself and a grilled cheese for L. The cost was just under $20 and it gave me a 20 minute ETA on it being ready.
I took my time heading to the shop since we were only ten minutes away. When it got close to the time DoorDash said it’d be ready, I walked in to find a pretty large deli area with a lot of the things you would expect to find in a deli. The menu was hanging above this area and it took several TV screens to fit it all on. There were a couple of guys working the grill as orders were continuing to roll in off DoorDash as I was standing there. The cash register had five or six large paper bags with orders stapled to them. A woman came from the kitchen area and asked if I was picking up. I gave her my name and she sorted through the bags until she found the one with my name on it.
There is a small dine in area with some cheap metal restaurant furniture. L was back at the hotel waiting for me though so I grabbed the bag and headed back down I-81 to the Comfort Inn.
I got back to the hotel about ten minutes later and popped open the boxes to see what we got. My sandwich pick was the pastrami sandwich which came on rye bread with pickles, Swiss cheese, and mustard. It’s also supposed to come with onions but I asked in the notes section to leave them off and they did. The sandwich is a pretty classic deli pastrami. It’s nice and warm and the pastrami is so juicy and flavorful. There’s a bit of a pepperiness to the meat that is cut down with the vinegar from the mustard. It was a pretty thick sandwich and like most warm pastrami sandwiches, the rye bread starts to struggle doing it’s job holding everything together. It was a bit messy but in the end, really delicious. I didn’t know if I even wanted dinner after a day of driving but definitely glad I decided to find something and really glad I found this pastrami.
I did the combo meal and added fries and a can of Pepsi to my sandwich. The fries are really crispy, really golden brown battered frozen fries. I’ve explained many times over the years that these aren’t my favorite fries but I always eat them. A fry is a fry, right? There were quite a few in the box and the sandwich was super filling so I didn’t eat them all. They included several packets of ketchup in the bag but I probably would have eaten more of these if I had mustard packets instead…but that’s just the country boy in me.
The sandwich I got L was a simple grilled cheese. This was really, really hard to find on the menu. It’s on the breakfast menu but it let me order it. It was supposed to just come on a roll with cheese but I upgraded to a Hero for $2.00 and added bacon. Both of those things were a good move. L called this thing the best grilled cheese she’s had in a really long time. The toasted bread did all it could to contain a massive amount of liquid golden yellow cheese (it was almost like Cheese Whiz) that was mixed with a large of amount of crispy, salty bacon. This isn’t a traditional grilled cheese with a couple of slices of American cheese on Texas toast slathered with mayo to make it golden brown. This thing, on the toasted Hero roll, with the liquid cheese and the bacon actually made for a pretty incredible sandwich.
Sammy’s NYC Deli & Grill wasn’t on my radar when we got to Syracuse. We were actually going to go to a Friendly’s for dinner (spoiler alert, we did that for breakfast the next day) but when no one else was hungry, I went looking for something I knew L would eat. I was a little hesitant at first not knowing what kind of sandwich she would get because it was so buried on their menu but it turned out to be one of the best Grilled Cheese sandwiches she’s ever had. My sandwich was delicious as well. We both went to bed with full bellies that night as we prepared to finish our trip to Lake Placid the next day.
SW Michigan Dining 
Trackbacks