08/15/2026
4100 Lake Street is my current office. 🙏🏽
The Lincoln Del started with Frank Berenberg, a Romanian Jewish immigrant who'd arrived in America in 1897 carrying an old sourdough starter with him. He worked at Northside Bakery in Minneapolis with the Malinsky family starting in 1930, then opened his own place, the Lincoln Bakery, on Saturday, April 27, 1935, at 1405 Sixth Avenue North in Minneapolis, naming it in admiration of Abraham Lincoln.
Frank sold the bakery to his sons in 1946, and by 1951 the business had grown to two locations. The real transformation came in 1957, when the second generation, led by Morrie Berenberg and his wife Tess, opened the first full-scale Lincoln Del restaurant at 4100 West Lake Street in St. Louis Park, a spot originally planned as just another bakery that turned into something bigger. A second location, Lincoln Del West, opened on Wayzata Boulevard in 1965, and a third, Lincoln Del South, opened in Bloomington in 1975. By the 1980s the three restaurants together employed nearly 450 people, roughly 250 of them living right in St. Louis Park.
What made the Lincoln Del more than just a good deli was what it meant to the Twin Cities Jewish community, and honestly to plenty of people outside it too. Wendi Zelkin Rosenstein, Morrie and Tess's granddaughter, who started working there at age eight, has described it plainly: the Del functioned as a secular synagogue, a place where AA meetings, prenup dinners, celebrations, and mourning all happened under the same roof. One longtime customer put it simply, saying that at the Del, if you didn't already know someone at your table, someone else did, through a cousin or a brother-in-law, the kind of layered community connection that only builds over decades in one neighborhood spot.
The food built its own loyal following regardless of background, caraway rye baked fresh daily, towering strawberry shortcake, cabbage borscht, corned beef sandwiches piled high, and Tess Berenberg's own recipes tested in the family kitchen before ever making the menu. Morrie died in 1994, Tess passed the business down through Danny, and the last location finally closed in 2000, ending 65 years running from a single Minneapolis bakery to a genuine Twin Cities institution. More than two decades after it closed, Rosenstein co-wrote The Lincoln Del Cookbook in 2017, and the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest still holds physical memorabilia from the restaurant, proof of how much a corned beef counter in St. Louis Park actually meant to the people who grew up eating there.
