Nicholas Goldberg: They've been making the world's best pastrami sandwiches for 75 years. Can they keep it up?

LOS ANGELES — The long, slow decline of the Jewish delicatessen has been bemoaned and lamented for many years.

In the early 1930s, there were more than 1,500 kosher delis and many more non-kosher ones in the five boroughs of New York alone, according to city records.

In recent years, the estimate fell to 150 in all of North America.