Types of Delis in St. Louis and How to Order at the Counter

Revised August 17, 2026

Imagine it’s the Thursday before a long weekend and somebody hands you a short list: something for sandwiches, something for the cooler, and something that feeds eleven relatives on Saturday. You could knock all of it out on one grocery run. You could also do it a lot better, in the same hour.

Maybe you grew up going to a counter in Florissant where the guy behind the glass knew to shave the ham without being asked. Maybe you’ve driven past a market in Bevo Mill fifty times and never walked in because you had no idea what to ask for. Maybe you work in Maryland Heights and get forty minutes.

Here’s what nobody tells you. The word deli covers at least five different businesses in this metro, and they are not interchangeable. Walking into the wrong one is why people get let down by a category St. Louis is genuinely good at.

What is the best deli in Saint Louis?

There isn’t one, and any list that crowns a single winner is answering a different question than the one you have. The metro runs at least five kinds of deli: Italian delis and groceries on The Hill, Jewish-style sandwich houses, Bosnian and Eastern European markets with a hot counter, corner-store and gas-station sandwich counters, and full grocery delis. Pick by errand, not by ranking.

Cured meat sliced to order and a jar of olive salad? Italian grocery. Corned beef piled on rye? Jewish-style. Burek by the pan and smoked beef by the half kilo? A Bosnian market. A sandwich built while you fill the truck? Corner counter. A tray for eighteen? Grocery deli.

What sandwich is St. Louis known for?

The Gerber. It’s a half-loaf of Italian or French bread spread with garlic butter, layered with ham and Provel, dusted with paprika and run under heat until the top blisters. The name comes from Dick Gerber, who ran a tire store next door to Ruma’s Deli and talked the family into letting him build his own sandwich in their kitchen. They put it on the menu in 1973, and half the counters in town have run a version since.

Provel is the other local answer, and it isn’t really cheese in the federal sense — it’s a processed blend of swiss, cheddar and provolone, commonly credited to a Hill grocery working with a Wisconsin dairy in the 1940s, trademark registered in 1950. It melts flat and bites clean instead of stringing.

The St. Paul sandwich is the region’s other native creation, though you won’t find it at a deli — an egg foo young patty with dill pickle, onion, lettuce and mayonnaise on white bread, sold at Chinese-American carryouts. Its origin is local legend more than settled record.

What does an Italian deli on The Hill do best?

Cured meat sliced to order, and pantry items you can’t buy anywhere else in town. An Italian deli is a grocery first and a sandwich shop second, so the counter exists to sell you a quarter pound of hot soppressata, fresh mozzarella in its own water, house sausage, olive salad and bread baked that morning.

That density isn’t an accident. Italian immigrants started arriving on The Hill in the 1880s to work the clay mines, and by 1910 six foundries were running; grocers and butchers came in behind them. The Hill’s own neighborhood history counts more than 30 restaurants and four Italian grocery stores in a footprint you can walk across in twenty minutes.

How to order: tell them what it’s for. Salami for a sandwich gets sliced thin; salami for a board gets sliced thick enough to stand up. Ask for the ends if you’re cooking with it.

What do Bosnian markets with a counter do best?

Smoked and air-dried beef, cevapi by weight, and pastry by the pan. South St. Louis holds the largest Bosnian community outside Bosnia and Herzegovina, with regional estimates running 60,000 to 70,000 people; roughly 11,000 refugees were resettled here between 1993 and 2001, and Bevo Mill picked up the nickname Little Bosnia because so many landed there first. Families have since spread into Affton, Mehlville and Oakville, and the markets followed.

A Bosnian market is a grocery with a counter in the back, not a restaurant with a shelf out front. Behind the glass you’ll typically find suho meso, sudzuk, kajmak, ajvar, feta in brine, and trays of burek and other pita sold by the piece or by weight. The pastry case empties first.

How to order: point, then say the weight. Half a kilo of cevapi is a normal ask. If you’ve never had it, buy small and come back — nobody minds a beginner, and most will tell you how to cook it.

Wildly off-topic — your brake pads need auto parts, not pastrami.

Where do Jewish-style delis, corner counters and grocery delis fit?

A Jewish-style deli is built around brisket that’s been cured and then steamed — corned beef and pastrami, cut across the grain, stacked on rye with mustard, never mayonnaise. One honest note: Jewish-style and certified kosher are different things, and most delis here are the former. If kashrut matters to you, ask about certification rather than reading it off a menu.

Corner-store and gas-station sandwich counters are the workhorses of this category. They feed trades crews and second shift fast, they turn their meat constantly because volume is the model, and in plenty of Belleville and north county neighborhoods they are the only made-to-order lunch inside five minutes.

Grocery delis are underrated for one job: buying by weight, salads by the pound, and party trays with a phone number that answers. They also stock the low-sodium options most independent counters don’t. To check a counter’s inspection record, the City of St. Louis publishes a food-service ratings search.

How do you order at a deli counter without holding up the line?

Say the weight, not the number of slices, and say the thickness. Those two habits are the whole difference between a smooth order and the sigh behind you. Take a number, decide before it’s called, and lead with what the meat is for.

The vocabulary is short: shaved, thin, sandwich cut, thick. Shaved is for hot sandwiches where you want the meat to fold. Sandwich cut is the default. Thick is for cubing into salads. Ask for a sample slice before they run the order — that request is normal — and order meats before cheese so the slicer isn’t broken down twice.

When is the deli lunch rush in St. Louis?

Roughly 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on weekdays, and it’s a wall. If your order is a sandwich, fine. If it’s four different things sliced to order, go at 10 a.m. or after 2 p.m.

Grocery deli counters run a second peak from about 4 to 6 p.m. on weeknights and a long one Sunday midday. Saturday morning is the quiet window for a by-weight run in Kirkwood, St. Charles or Belleville. A few days a year are simply tray days — the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Super Bowl Sunday, graduation Saturdays in May. Call ahead on those.

How much meat and cheese should you buy by weight?

A normal sandwich takes 2 to 3 ounces of sliced meat, so a pound covers five to eight sandwiches and a half pound covers three or four. Cheese runs about an ounce a sandwich. Buy for the days you’ll actually eat it.

USDA guidance puts opened or deli-sliced lunch meat at 3 to 5 days in a refrigerator held at 40°F or below, and 1 to 2 months frozen. That’s the case for the half-pound ask over the two-pound ask.

One safety note worth taking seriously: refrigeration does not kill listeria. After the 2024 outbreak traced to meats sliced at delis, CDC and FDA advice for higher-risk eaters — pregnant people, adults over 65, anyone immunocompromised — is to heat deli-sliced meat to 165°F, steaming hot, before eating it. On sodium, the American Heart Association lists cold cuts and cured meats among its Salty Six, against a recommended ceiling of 2,300 mg a day.

How do you order a catering tray from a deli?

Give 48 to 72 hours for an ordinary tray and a full week around a holiday, then plan about 3 ounces of meat per adult, or roughly a sandwich and a half a head. Order bread separately if the event runs long — pre-built sandwiches go soft.

Ask four things when you call: what’s on the tray, whether condiments come on the side, what the pickup window is, and whether they hold trays cold until you arrive. Then remember the USDA two-hour rule — perishable food shouldn’t sit out longer than two hours, or one hour above 90°F, which matters at every August graduation party here. The same lead-time logic applies to tables, tents and chairs.

Why does the same sandwich ring up differently across the river?

Because Missouri and Illinois tax groceries and prepared food on different rules, and a deli sits right on that line. In Missouri, qualifying food for home consumption carries a reduced state sales tax rate of 1.225% instead of the full 4.225%, per the Department of Revenue. The reduced rate doesn’t apply where more than 80% of gross receipts come from food prepared for immediate consumption — most standalone delis. Missouri also treats refrigerated and room-temperature items as qualifying even when you heat them on the premises, which is why a cold case and a hot counter twelve feet apart can carry different rates.

Illinois moved in January. The state’s 1% grocery tax was eliminated effective January 1, 2026 under Public Act 103-0781, and municipalities and counties may now impose their own 1% grocery tax by ordinance — the Illinois Department of Revenue had received more than 600 of them. Food prepared for immediate consumption was never in the grocery bucket and is still taxed at general merchandise rates. So in Belleville or Edwardsville, the cold-case sandwich and the counter-built one are different tax animals.

What does a deli counter actually make money on?

Not the pound of ham. Sliced meat by weight is close to a passthrough on a commodity price the shop doesn’t set, and every counter eats yield loss on the slicer, the heels, and whatever doesn’t move out of the case. The margin lives in the built sandwich, the house salads, and above all the catering tray — which is why the two weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas, plus Super Bowl Sunday and graduation season, carry a slow February. The complaint operators trade is always the same: same-day tray calls on Christmas Eve, and orders placed by slice count when the scale is the only thing the register understands. Good ones fix that at the counter, gently, one order at a time. It also means being findable matters more than a quiet category suggests — people search for a deli near them and drive to whoever they can see, so shops can get listed in a few minutes.

Frequently asked questions

What is a must eat in St. Louis?

If you’re eating the deli side of town, make it a Gerber plus something from an Italian grocery counter — hot soppressata, fresh mozzarella, olive salad. Add a burek from a Bosnian market in south city. Those three cover the actual local traditions instead of the tourist checklist.

What sandwich is St. Louis known for?

The Gerber: garlic-buttered Italian or French bread with ham and Provel, dusted with paprika and broiled open-faced. It was named for Dick Gerber and added to Ruma’s Deli menu in 1973. The St. Paul sandwich, an egg foo young patty on white bread, is the other regional original, though it lives at Chinese-American carryouts rather than delis.

What is the average cost of a deli sandwich?

No agency publishes an average for this, so treat any single figure as a guess. What moves the price is meat weight, whether it’s pre-made in a cold case or built to order, and tax treatment — in Missouri, prepared food at a deli falls under the full 4.225% state rate rather than the 1.225% reduced food rate.

What’s a good side to order at a deli?

Whatever the case is turning over fastest, because sides are sold by the pound and freshness tracks volume. Practical picks: a vinegar-based slaw or pasta salad if the sandwich is rich, potato salad if it isn’t, a pickle spear either way. At an Italian grocery, olive salad doubles as a sandwich upgrade.

What is the unhealthiest lunch meat?

There’s no single worst one, but the cured, high-sodium options — salami, bologna, pepperoni — are the ones the American Heart Association flags, since cold cuts and cured meats sit on its Salty Six list against a 2,300 mg daily sodium ceiling. Lower-sodium roast turkey or roast beef sliced at the counter is the easy swap.

What is the best deli in downtown St. Louis?

Downtown skews toward weekday counters built for office and courthouse traffic, so expect speed and a tight menu rather than a full grocery case. Judge it on turnover and hours: a downtown counter that closes at 2 p.m. is usually the one locals actually use. For a by-weight or catering run, you’ll do better on The Hill.

Where can I find the best lunch in Saint Louis?

Match the counter to the hour you have. Forty minutes near an office park means a corner or grocery counter; ninety minutes means The Hill or a south-city market where you can shop and eat. Going between 10 and 11:30 a.m. or after 2 p.m. gets you a better sandwich from a calmer counter almost anywhere in the metro.

About the Author: The St Louis Near Me Directory Team
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.

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