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I'm still wondering how this restaurant's rye bread, touted as twice-baked rye on the menu, could be served without a crust. Funny, huh? Like the bagels and buns served here, the rye bread is baked at Bagelworks and is tasty enough when spread with the house-made chopped liver (a little pasty: it needs some shmaltz) and is far superior to the other bread on the plate — fried bagel crisps that were greasy enough for three oil changes at Jiffy Lube.
The plain — mercifully unfried — whole bagel served with my lox platter, "the Lox Box," wasn't any more enticing. It did provide a solid base for heaping plump smoked salmon, cream cheese, sliced tomato and cucumbers.
While I'm nit-picking on the bread, the rye slices holding together an otherwise perfect Reuben sandwich weren't grilled. They were toasted. The challah bread used for the open-faced brisket sandwich — outstanding, fork-tender beef brisket, by the way — wasn't the lightest version of this deli standard, either.
I've heard a couple of people (including a caller on a local radio show) gripe about the portions of meat on the sandwiches at Marv's. I found the stacks of pastrami, corned beef and roast beef on the specialty sandwiches to be more than generous for the price.
Marv's desserts are outsourced to the local Three Women and an Oven bakery, which does a fine job with a limited but rotating array of sweets, including a tart lemon bar and a deliciously fudgy chocolate layer cake. But Marv's doesn't do so well displaying the pretty pastries in its so-called "deli counter."
The problem with an upstart deli like Marv's is the illusion it gives of having been around for decades. That veneer can throw off customers expecting a polished operation. It's going to take more than a vintage Coke sign to generate the confident air of a long-established delicatessen. Marv's has real growing pains to overcome on its way to becoming the real deal.
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