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The Deli Debate: Convenience or Distraction?

Cosmo Music, Journalist • June 13, 2025

Anyone coming off the R train has surely walked by the deli on the way, and seen a congregation of students loitering there; but what is happening there? From the outside, students going to the deli are simply staying there and not going to school on time, only leaving when the deli closes around 10.

It seems that the deli is blatantly facilitating kids’ truancy, and the school can do nothing to stop it except hope that the students get bored and go to school, or have to leave because it’s closing. There’s also the simpler aspect that students are spending time unsupervised off of school grounds on school time with a 58 year old man; do with that what you will, but that is a fact.

Conversely, the owner of the deli Anthony, known better as Ant, does not want the students in his deli once school has started, saying “I want to see kids going to school and getting motivated about going to school and getting something out of it”. Despite this, kids still find a way to loiter there past the bell every day without fail.

Ant can say what he wants but the fact of the matter is that his deli is fostering a place where students can reside whenever they want. Now one could chalk this up to a location issue, “how is Ant expected to not get customers that are school kids if his establishment is right next to a school?” Well, there are a couple of things in his deli that make it easier to be there for long periods of time, mainly the seating in the back.

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The other closest deli, Sakman Grill & Gourmet, has neither seats nor tables for kids to sit at, and as a result if a student wanted to wait out the clock of their first few school periods they are forced to stand in the already cramped aisles.

But what of City League Coffee Roasters? Located on 6808 4th Ave, it seems as though they have the perfect conditions for kids to wait out school: close proximity to both the train and HSTAT; seats; tables; food; drinks; and it has air conditioning and heating, why are kids not also there? While it is true that City League used to be plagued by the same issue as Ant’s deli, they enacted a couple of rules that scared kids off.

For starters, to sit down at their tables you have to buy something, and that goes for everyone who wants to sit down. Secondly, even after you buy something you’re not invincible to being kicked out; if you’re too loud you, and everyone else that you’re sitting with, are asked to leave. Furthermore, City League is in cohorts with HSTAT, and often act as informants on students who don’t leave by 8:05 by calling the school and telling them about it.

But beyond that, City League isn’t the place kids go to when they want to cut class. They can’t be loud, they need to buy something to be there, and a seemingly big part of it: they can’t smoke there. When I talked to an anonymous student about why people go to the deli rather than City League they said that a very big reason was that at the deli Ant does not care what the students are doing, as long as no one’s dying anything goes.

When I spoke to Dean Mr. Rubin, he expressed that the school is aware of the deli conundrum, but went on to share that they are in a bit of a holding pattern. They can’t enforce much about kids at the deli. They can inform student’s parents about their child’s truancy, or tell the student that if they don’t start coming to school on time they will get workshop, or even go to the deli while the kids are there and bring them to school, but they cannot make it so that the student was never at the deli in the morning, and as it stands not at the deli the next day.

The head of the dean’s office, Mr. Cunningham’s proposed solution to the deli was to get Ant to start selling to kids at 8:10 and no earlier so that kids have to make a much more conscious decision to be late, as they would have to already be ten minutes late when they show up to the deli.

Regardless of the proposed solutions, as it stands now the relationship between the school and the deli is unhealthy. The good that delis should serve to high school communities, providing hungry teens with fuel to get them through the day, is instead serving as a hurdle for students to get to school.

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About the Contributor

Cosmo Music, Journalist

I enjoy writing with fountain pens to the point that I can’t write anything by hand without one. It wasn’t something that had always been true, as I used to be fine with doing work using some pencil, and usually a different one from the day prior, since I was terrible at keeping them in my pocket. I think the first time I ever used a fountain pen was when I found a ten-pack of Zebra disposable fountain pens in my house and decided to use them (which I still have). For me, having a “nice” pen for the first time made it so that I never lost it, since every time I got up, I checked my pockets to make sure it was still there. Eventually, my brother got a nice fountain pen, a TWSBI Eco, and it seemed like a good time for me to get an upgrade, too. The only problem was that I, A, had no money, and B, had no clue where to get one. I hit a lucky break when I was at my friend’s house and stumbled upon his brother’s box of fountain pens, and my god, it was a gold mine: there was a calligraphy pen, a Parker 51, a Montblanc Meisterstrück, an assortment of calligraphy stub nibs, an innumerable amount of ink bottles, and at the bottom of the pile, a Lamy Safari. Unfortunately, my first fountain pen was not the $800 Montblanc, but instead the humble clear Lamy Safari with a stainless-steel medium-size nib. Even still, it seemed like a 24-karat nib with a black resin body and gold accents to me. However weird it may sound, the first day I used that pen in class, it brought me literal joy when I used it. I used that Lamy Safari every single day for the rest of my eighth-grade year, and continued to use it until about the quarter mark of freshman year, when I decided that it somehow became not good enough for me, and felt the need to get a new pen. I went to the Fountain Pen Hospital in Manhattan to get it, as I could try it out and see if I liked it. After a bit of testing out pens, I landed on the Monteverde Dakota, a small, all-metal pen made for everyday writing. This time, that same pure joy from the pen was there, but even more so. The nib felt like it moved across the page with zero friction, the weight of the metal was perfect, not too heavy, not too light, and balanced towards the front; I was again in love with a pen. I used that pen every day until halfway through the year, where I again felt a strange need to get a new one. Again I returned to the Fountain Pen Hospital, except this time I knew what I was looking for, and an infinite amount more knowledge. I ended up with a Pilot Elite 95 with a fine 14-karat gold nib, which I now use every day.