Crystal Wise
There’s not a bad time to go to Carshon’s, but the BEST time to go is around noon when the lunch rush is in full swing. You may have to wait a bit for a table, but noon is, roughly, give or take a few minutes, when the pies come out of the oven.
You won’t find a better slice of meringue pie anywhere in Fort Worth, its chocolate or banana or coconut or lemon fillings still trembling from the heat of the oven, its crown of fluffy meringue melting in your mouth like cotton candy.
Oh, there are sandwiches, too. One of the city’s oldest and most beloved restaurants, Carshon’s Deli is best known, in this century and the last one, for spectacular sandwiches. They’re simple things, really, just layer upon layer of meat and cheese and maybe sauerkraut and whatever spread you want, squeezed into outstanding bread.
How and why no one else in Fort Worth can do a sandwich as good as Carshon’s is a mystery we have zero interest in solving.
There will never come a day when some restaurant, sandwich shop, pop-up kitchen or food truck will stop boasting of having the best sandwiches in town, and there will never come a day when we won’t remind them that they are lying.
Crystal Wise
Doubters and skeptics and those who have moved here from Dallas and California and maybe just don’t know any better, you only need to try one of Carshon’s sandwiches to see the error of your ways. Hmmm, though, what should that sandwich be? Do you like cream cheese squished between turkey and pastrami? First off, you should. Secondly, you need Rebecca.
The Rebecca is, depending on what day you ask us, what kind of mood we’re in, and other factors that may affect our purely subjective analysis, the best sandwich in Fort Worth. Perfectly sliced so it’s not too thick or thin, layers of pastrami and smoked turkey are accompanied by a blanket of cream cheese and Russian dressing, all of which are evenly dispersed between three pieces of grilled egg bread.
Now, if you ask us tomorrow what the best sandwich is in Fort Worth, we may not say Rebecca; we may say Rachel. Depends on our mood, remember?
The Rachel stole our hearts years and years and years ago, before we were introduced to the seductive ways of the Rebecca. Rachel was there first, wielding slices of corned beef and turkey, heating up our mouths with still-melting Swiss cheese, cooling us down with a sheet of coleslaw and Russian dressing, and bringing everything together on grilled rye bread.
It was the first time we — and possibly you — had ever had rye bread. Many Fort Worthians grew up on your bread basics: white or wheat. Carshon’s — opened downtown in 1928 by Jewish immigrant David Carshon and later moved to Berry Street, then, finally, to its current digs on Cleburne Road — is quite possibly where many of us discovered this bread’s unique pleasures.
Herein lies our city’s primary culinary dilemma — not sauce or no sauce on barbecue, not beans or no beans in chili, not Mex-Mex or Tex-Mex. It is, and always will be, as long as Carshon’s is open, Rebecca or Rachel.
