Sorry to have been a bit M.I.A. lately – my personal life has been rather hectic. This week will be a little light on columns, too, as both of my parents have doctor appointments in L.A. that I have to take them, too. So please bear with me. 
And now, on with the the post! Another day, another Iggy Azalea location. Because my good friends Kim and Lavonna are such Iggy fans, before their recent visit, I did some research on locales from the Australian rapper’s “Black Widow” music video. The place that I was most excited about tracking down was the restaurant that appeared in both the video’s opening and closing scenes. As it turns out, the eatery is none other than Langer’s Delicatessen-Restaurant, an L.A. staple that was originally founded in 1947. So the girls and I headed right on out to Westlake to stalk it while they were in town last month.
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Langer’s was originally founded by New Jersey native Al Langer. Al started in the restaurant business early in life, getting a job as a busboy in a delicatessen at the age of 11. During those years he learned how to hand-slice pastrami, a rare skill that served him well as he ventured out on his own. Al’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1936 and he continued to work in the restaurant business. That same year, he opened a deli in Palm Springs. The deli only lasted one short season and Al subsequently returned to L.A. He worked again in a café, before serving in World War II. When the war ended, Al purchased a small eatery in Los Angeles, which he owned for a year. He then bought a 12-seat restaurant on the corner of 7th and Alvarado Streets known as The Famous Deli and renamed it Langer’s. The place was popular from the get-go and Al wound up expanding it twice. Today, Al’s son, Norm, still serves his father’s famous pastrami sandwiches from that very same location, which can now seat 135 patrons.
Sadly, we showed up to stalk Langer’s in the early evening and it was no longer open (it closes at 4 p.m. each afternoon), so we were only able to snap photographs of the interior through the windows. (A BIG thank you to Lavonna for taking all of the pictures that appear in this post!)
In “Black Widow,” Langer’s masks as “Big Wanda’s Killer Burgers,” where Iggy Azalea works and where Michael Madsen and Rita Ora stop by for a bacon sandwich with cheese – “like a lotta cheese, OK, like melted cheese, like dripping off of it.”
Only the interior of Langer’s was featured in the video and, as you can see, it looks exactly the same in person as it does onscreen.
You can watch the “Black Widow” video by clicking below.
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Until next time, Happy Stalking!
Stalk It: Langer’s Delicatessen-Restaurant, from Iggy Azalea’s “Black Widow” music video, is located at 704 South Alvarado Street in Westlake. Langer’s is open Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can visit the eatery’s official website here.
