08-07-2025
Jewish deli dream becomes reality in Northampton
'It is this homage to where we all come from, and how we got where we all are today, and the food we grew up with,' Hanley says. 'There's such a nostalgia connected to it that is so deep.'
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The new deli was eight years in the making, starting around 2017 when Lichter and Levin, both music managers, teamed up to work with the folk trio
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'It was something that we continuously were joking about with each other, just to entertain ourselves and give our brains a break from thinking about our music work,' says Lichter, who also manages
The menu at Lichter & Levin Delicatessen includes sweet treats like these cookies.
Yasmina Mattison
In 2019, they pushed the idea further by commissioning a logo, coming up with a slogan ('open for brunch and linner') and printing up hoodies and T-shirts, purely to amuse themselves. That November, they posted photos of the merch on a new Lichter & Levin Instagram page with the tongue-in-cheek caption 'coming soon.' The post went 'small-town viral,' Lichter says, prompting a story in the local newspaper. The surge of buzz about the possibility of a deli coming to Northampton reached Wynn, who owned a café called the Roost that she had been thinking of converting into one.
'When those posts hit Instagram in 2019, I was shaken in my boots,' says Wynn, who opened the Roost in 2011. 'I was like, someone's going to open a Jewish deli in Northampton. The Roost will be out of business in five minutes.'
Though Lichter and Levin ended up meeting with a few potential partners, the timing was off: before they could seriously pursue it, the pandemic arrived. By 2023, the pair had come back to the idea, but were exploring locations in Connecticut and New York. Meanwhile, Hanley, a classically trained chef with a background in fine dining in New York, had recently moved to Western Mass. and was looking to open a deli. Through community connections, Hanley met Wynn and came to work at the Roost while they plotted how to overhaul the coffee shop into something new.
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Lighted signs mounted to the wall inside Lichter & Levin Delicatessen in Northampton.
Yasmina Mattison
'Café business, the model is tough,' says Wynn, who moved to Northampton in 2009 after a decade performing in the Long Island hip-hop trio Northern State. 'It was always tough. It was never a very profitable business. It was kind of break-even at best. But then the pandemic really put me underwater, and there was really no way to climb out of that.'
Hanley and Wynn worked up a deli pitch to show to possible investors. They were introduced to Lichter and Levin through mutual acquaintances on the Shluggers, the local synagogue's softball team. One of them was Matt Wool, a New York-born deli enthusiast who had bought a Lichter & Levin hoodie when they first became available. He joined Lichter and Levin for a meeting with Hanley and Wynn late in 2024. A food tasting followed on a frigid evening in December, where a small group sampled Hanley's food: whitefish salad, briny house-cured lox, knishes, tangy half-sour pickles with just the right snap, vegan pastrami, hearty matzo ball soup, and desserts including mini-babkas, rugelach, and black-and-white cookies.
'The combination of food was so spot-on,' says Levin, who also manages the band Lucius, singer Aoife O'Donovan and others as part of Good Harbor Music. 'This was exactly what we had wanted, and what we had jokingly talked about back in 2017 and '18.'
With Hanley, Lichter, Levin, and Wool going in as partners, Wynn closed the Roost in March. She went to work for Lichter & Levin and turned over the space, which she owns, to the deli for a facelift. The new design features royal blue paint and white subway tile. One wall is covered with old snapshots of the owners' grandparents and great-grandparents — the ones who ran butcher shops and delis. There are also archival photographs, curated with help from the Historic Northampton museum, depicting Jewish life in town and the history of the building, which once shared a parking lot with
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The fact that three separate groups were interested in opening a New York-style deli before they joined forces suggests that there's a market for it in Western Massachusetts. More than that, though, it's the kind of restaurant the Lichter & Levin team wanted to exist where they live. For them, opening a deli is a way of forging closer ties with their community in a way that links them to their family traditions.
'There's a Yiddish term 'bashert,' which roughly translates to 'meant to be,'' Levin says. 'In all of our family histories, you can draw a line to serving food to people. That connection to where we all come from, combined with the comfort of having a place like this right here in the community, is why I'm doing it.'
