What, exactly, do you order at a Jewish deli if you’ve never been to one? It’s a fair question, and the short answer, if you’re standing at the counter at Cecil’s on Cleveland Avenue in St. Paul — close enough to Minneapolis that the distinction barely matters on a cold Tuesday — is: ask the person behind the counter. They will not be annoyed. They have been answering this question for a long time.
Cecil’s has been open since 1949, which means it predates a fair amount of what people consider essential to the Twin Cities food scene. The current iteration is quieter than it probably was in its mid-century heyday, but the deli case still runs the length of the room and the pastrami is still hand-carved, and if you sit long enough in one of the booths, you get the distinct sense that the place is simply waiting out its trendier competitors. It has done this before.
The person most associated with keeping that continuity is Dave Ketroser, who has worked at Cecil’s for something approaching forever and knows the operation the way a ship’s pilot knows a river — not from a map, but from having run it in every condition. He’s not always the one you’ll see when you walk in, but his influence is in the food: pastrami that has actual character, rye bread baked in-house, matzo ball soup that is neither timid nor overworked. These are not small achievements. They are the result of someone caring about the details long after it would have been easier not to.
The menu covers the expected deli ground — corned beef, tongue, chopped liver, lox — without any ironic framing or modernizing. This is either a limitation or a virtue depending on your disposition. Regulars treat it as the latter. On a Saturday morning, the booths fill with older couples who’ve been coming for thirty years and younger families trying to explain to their kids why a pickle is a condiment. The coffee is diner coffee, refilled without being asked. The bagels are the real thing: dense, chewy, with a crust that has some resistance to it.
A full sandwich — the pastrami on rye, say, built properly with mustard and served with a half-sour — runs somewhere in the $14–$18 range, which is reasonable for the quantity and more than reasonable for the quality. The soups are around $7–$9 for a bowl. It’s not cheap in the way a fast-casual counter is cheap, but you are not eating fast-casual food.
The room itself is functional and plain in the way that places from that era often are: drop ceilings, laminate tables, a deli case lit with the kind of fluorescence that makes everything look exactly like what it is. There’s nothing atmospheric about it, which is almost the point. Cecil’s doesn’t dress up. The food is the argument.
First-timers occasionally walk out a little dazed, having ordered more than they intended because the counter staff made it sound reasonable. They’re right. Get the soup. Get the sandwich. If someone behind the counter recommends the chopped liver, take the recommendation seriously. Dave has been making this stuff longer than most Minneapolis restaurants have existed, and he is not guessing.
