Customers waiting for tables at 6:30 on a recent Wednesday evening: daughter—huge Louis Vuitton bag, highlighted hair—and father, portly, refuse seats at counter. Mother-daughter team, eyes roll when told it would be a few minutes. A man—fiftyish, tall, black leather jacket—turns right around and declares, “I don’t wait!”

And why, in fact, get takeout? After all, the real joy of eating food from the Second Avenue Deli is, finally, being given the signal to head on back to the restaurant—past the register with its T-shirts for sale and tzedaka boxes ready to accept loose change for Israel—where tables are crammed into every possible square inch of floor space (parties of two are often asked to share a four-top with another couple), and on the walls are black-and-white photographs of early 20th-century Yiddish theater stars.

At the surrounding tables, men in yarmulkes scarf down sandwiches, and a couple argues, in Hebrew, what to order. When the next table asks for butter, the waiter tells them, eyebrow raised, “We only have margarine.” (Second Avenue Deli is kosher, though it doesn’t close on the Sabbath, thereby making it off-limits to some observant Jews.) As soon as we sit down, the waiter brings pickles (half-sour and full-sour) and a bowl of cole slaw. But we don’t get the free serving of gribenes, fried chicken fat, that seems to have appeared at every other table. Maybe we’re not “too Jewish” enough.

I GUESS IF I had really wanted four-star treatment, I would have resurrected my great-grandfather from the grave so he could have one last tongue sandwich on rye, though his eyes probably would have bulged out of their sockets when he saw the price: $20.95! (Same price for center or tip, which is extra-lean). My grandfather, who is still living, probably would have ordered a corned-beef sandwich ($13.75), although he has, as of late, shown a strangely stubborn predilection for tuna salad (at $10.50, one of the cheapest sandwiches on the menu). It seemed over the top, even for such an assignment, to fly him up from Florida, and besides, what does he know. His other favorite dish is shrimp in lobster sauce, preferably from one of those suburban Chinese restaurants that has specialized in Moo Goo Gai Pan and Sweet and Sour Chicken for 40 years.

Alas, I had brought only my brother and my boyfriend. Still, both of them can eat—and I mean really eat, like I have no doubt both of them could have finished one of the triple-deckers (order by number, please), though it also would have meant my boyfriend would have been asked, kindly, to sleep on the couch if he had even considered ordering the roast beef, which comes weighed down by Bermuda onions, chicken fat, lettuce and tomato. Or the Royal Second Avenue—everything but the kitchen sink! Burp. Or, you know, the other end.

Still, we managed to do all right. To begin: three bowls of matzo ball soup, which seemed to be the starter of choice for most of the tables surrounding us. It is necessary to get it with carrots and noodles, except at Passover, when there are no noodles, but that’s kind of a moot point anyway because the Second Avenue Deli is closed during Passover. Can you even imagine trying to clean that entire place of every last crumb? No, better to close and let everyone celebrate with their families at the Fontainebleau.

Then, since we felt that the only way to dine at the Second Avenue Deli was to overeat, we had the chopped liver: not too pungent for the wimps at the table (me) but flavorful enough for the aficionados (them), served with a few slices of bread. I took a tentative shmeer and decided that my chopped liver experiences, heretofore, had been inferior and I had unfairly dismissed that entire liver food group. Also: blintzes, made with parve (that is, neither dairy nor meat) cheese, served with applesauce, and a huge potato pancake, also served with applesauce. By this point any normal person would have packed up and gone home, sated with more food than is humanly necessary, but we had been charged with eating the food of our parents and our parents’ parents and our parents’ parents’ parents, and so my brother and I got hot pastrami sandwiches and my boyfriend got corned beef and salami. Oh, and Dr. Brown’s cream soda, which of course is the only drink allowed at a deli, really.

I ate half my sandwich, got the rest to go, and by the time we left, the little vestibule was packed. Maybe those waiting customers detected a hint of a smirk on my face. I wouldn’t be surprised.

His son, Jeremy Lebewohl, meanwhile, brandished a foot-long pair of scissors.

At least 20 members of the press corps, ranging from Reuters to Jewish Week, were on hand as the Lebewohls' cut the ceremonial salami and officially reopened the clan's hallowed Second Avenue Deli on Monday.

"Here's a circumsized one," Jack Lebewohl joked, handing off a partially gnawed sausage to an employee.

Behind them, a plaque hung in memory of deli founder Abe Lebewohl, whose 1996 murder remains unsolved. (A poster offering a reward for information in the case was also posted.)

Inside, reporters and cameramen jockeyed with customers and employees for elbow room along the shiny new deli counter. In the booth-lined seating area, Jeremy Lebewohl fielded questions about the new location.

"Everything in here is new, everything in here is top notch," he said. "All the wood trimming is mahogany, granite counter tops at the bar--I really didn't spare any expense."

The deli's famous menu remains mostly the same, though every table will now be treated to complimentary samples of gribenes. "Gribenes is deep-fried chicken skin, covered in fried onions," Jeremy Lebewohl explained. "There are so many things on the menu that I think people would love. But when people come into a deli, they know we have pastrami, they know we have chopped liver. I want them to try other things."

The arrival of the Lebewohls' renowned eatery in Murray Hill might sound ominous to the folks at Sarge's, the neighborhood's longstanding Jewish deli, just four blocks up Third Avenue.

But Jeremy Lebewohl instead expressed hope for some pastrami-laden synergy in the 'hood.

"Nothing would make me happier than if people start saying, 'If you want the best deli food in Manhattan, you go to Third Avenue,'" he said. "That would be fantastic."

But, Monday morning, it's all about the "nickel shtickel."

Mr. Lebewohl and family will cut the ceremonial salami at 11, officially reopening his late uncle Abe Lebewohl's beloved Second Avenue Deli at 162 East 33rd Street near Third Avenue.

The Observer will be on hand to cover the festivities.

"There’s not a single deli in Manhattan that can compare," young Mr. Lebewohl has said.

What does this mean for rival Jewish deli Sarge's, located four blocks away?

Stay tuned.

A spokesperson for the Lebewohl family said Tuesday that the grand-opening festivities will commence at 11 a.m. at the new deli, located at 162 East 33rd Street near Third Avenue.

She added that the ceremonial meat would be "nickel shtikle."

Further details on the long-awaited opening:

NY1 follows up today with some additional details about the hallowed eatery's new digs:

According to NY1, the deli is "expected to open within the next month."

Ed Levine of SeriousEats.com last week called the deli's forthcoming resurrection "the most eagerly anticipated new restaurant opening of the year in New York."

But he wondered, "which Second Avenue Deli will it be: the deli that served the best all-around deli food, which is what it was when the late, beloved Abe Lebewohl was around, or the very good but not great deli it became after Abe was senselessly gunned down while making a bank deposit and his lawyer brother, Jack, took over?"

Perhaps neither. The new deli reportedly will be run by Abe's twenty-something nephews, Jeremy and Joshua Lebewohl. "The restaurant will operate 24/7," according to a recent Times Magazine story, "serving its same enormous menu."

UPDATE: A deli spokesperson has informed The Observer that, contrary to the Real Deal article, the hallowed eatery will not open next week.

And so the battle for bragging rights as Murray Hill's top matzo-ball-soup maker heats up!

As The Observer reported last week, the new Second Avenue Deli is moving in just four blocks south of another historic (albeit less storied) Jewish deli, Sarge's, at 548 Third Avenue between 36th and 37th streets, which already operates around the clock.

"It will be interesting," one Sarge's server told this reporter last week, noting that the old Second Avenue served kosher fare, whereas Sarge's does not. "That doesn't bode well," she said.

He was referring to Sarge’s, the grungy old Jewish delicatessen with the bright red awning on Third Avenue between 36th and 37th streets.

For more than four decades, this hole-in-the-wall house of hot brisket, corned beef and pastrami has carved out its niche in the neighborhood, tucked far away from the more famous Manhattan cured-meat meccas of Carnegie and Katz’s—an island of overstuffed rye sandwiches amid the culinary Indian Ocean colloquially known as “Curry Hill.”

“You come here for the food and because you know [the place],” said Mr. Failla, a 30-year-old stand-up comic and regular patron since the age of 15, as he finished off a plate of fried kreplach on Monday night. He said he comes for the “gritty” vibe (“You feel like you’re in Old New York,” he said) as much as the hearty fare.

Call it “seedy,” or even “depressing.” (Zagat Survey has used both terms.) But in 2001, New York magazine awarded Sarge’s the distinction of having “the best corned-beef sandwich north of Second Avenue Deli.”

Weeks from now, that title might still hold true, if only by four short blocks.

Heirs of the hallowed Second Avenue Deli, which shuttered its original East Village location during a 2006 rent-hike dispute, are now encroaching upon Sarge’s turf, with construction well under way to reincarnate the fabled eatery in the space of a former tapas joint on 33rd Street, nearest the corner of Third Avenue. (The proprietors had reportedly planned to open this past summer, yet the work continues. Exactly when it will open is unclear. “It’s hard to say,” said a woman who answered the phone at the new address on Monday. “We’re having gas problems right now.”)

Once it opens, the new location threatens to set up a head-to-head scrum for bragging rights as the area’s knish capital, pitting against one another two of the city’s enduring delicatessen clans, both of whose founding patriarchs, it turns out, happened to be named Abe:

The descendants of the late Abe Lebewohl, a Holocaust survivor who famously opened Second Avenue Deli at the corner of Second Avenue and East 10th Street in 1954, versus the descendants of the late Abe Katz, a local police sergeant who parlayed his late-night hunger during graveyard shifts working the beat into the opening of Sarge’s in 1964.

Sarge’s has operated round-the-clock ever since its founding, with Katz’s grandson, Michael Katz, now running the place. Second Avenue Deli has shut down more than once: after Abe Lebewohl’s 1996 murder at the hands of a robber, and again last year in the face of a reported $9,000 rent hike.

Lebewohl’s nephews, Jeremy and Joshua Lebewohl, now plan to resurrect the family deli while also attempting to preempt any repeats of its prior tenant troubles. (The family bought the whole five-story building on 33rd Street this past January for more than $5 million, city records show.) According to the State Liquor Authority, the brothers have applied for a liquor license under the corporate moniker Uncle Abies Deli Inc.

The brothers Lebewohl undoubtedly enter a new neighborhood armed with Uncle Abie’s cachet. But can they deliver the same quality product?

“The reason the Second Avenue Deli was great was Abe,” said food writer Ed Levine, author of New York Eats and founder of the Internet food site SeriousEats.com (as well as a former Observer dining columnist). “He was an obsessive sort of perfectionist when it came to deli food.”

After Lebewohl’s death, his brother, Jack Lebewohl, carried on with the business (and its mythology). Still, “the deli wasn’t what it once was while Abe was alive,” Mr. Levine argued.

“The idea that it’s being resurrected, we all go, ‘Hey, that’s awesome,’” Mr. Levine said. “But in the end, it’s going to be about the food and about the standards that someone in there is setting.”

Sarge’s, meanwhile, has never enjoyed the same level of buzz as its southern competitor. “They’re sort of the deli under the radar,” Mr. Levine said. “Their fame has never become institutionalized. They’ve never become media darlings.

“The Second Avenue Deli had all the mythology built up around it,” he added. “They got a lot of tourists. I don’t think Sarge’s has ever seen a tourist. Can you imagine a tour bus going to Sarge’s? Not gonna happen.”

Should Sarge’s brace for the worst once the Second Avenue buzz machine finally arrives on 33rd Street?

“I’d be more worried about the Cheesecake Factory moving in a few blocks away, or a Panera Bread, or some other chain,” said David Sax, author of the forthcoming corned-beef-biz chronicle, The Death of Deli. (About a third of which is based on New York City’s deteriorating deli scene, which the writer largely blames on real-estate pressures.)

“You know that another Jewish deli is going to have the same costs, they face the same challenges,” said Mr. Sax, who suggested the dueling delis could actually help each other.

“It could make that neighborhood a destination for delis, in the way that the Lower East Side or the East Village previously was. In that sense, it could be a good thing. If,” he added, “the owners are friendly with each other.”

“I think they’re crazy opening Second Avenue Deli on 33rd and Third,” said Debbie, a nine-year Sarge’s employee, of the looming competition. “It ain’t Second Avenue Deli anymore.

“We’ve been here too long,” she added. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Swatting insects away from his plate of corned beef on Monday night, Sarge’s customer Dean Imperial joked, “You’ll know they’re in trouble when the flies defect.”