Deli Is Dubbed Solomon’s To Honor Tower Records Founder

A Tower Records interior in 2010. A new Sacramento Deli is being named after Tower founder and native son Russ Solomon. Image by Flickr
If you’re a music lover of a certain age, you probably have fond memories of Tower Records, the gargantuan stores that seemed to carry every audible work ever recorded.

Now, a Sacramento deli is being named in honor of Tower founder and native son Russ Solomon, who is 91. Solomon’s Deli will open in late 2017 — in a former Tower Records store — with the motto “No bagels, no life,” the Sacramento Bee says. The slogan is a riff on the longtime Tower Records slogan “No music, no life.”
“Delis are community gathering places, just like Tower was,” says local restaurateur Andrea Lepore, who’ll be managing Solomon’s.
A comment on the Bee’s Facebook page predicts that there will be only two types of reviews: “1. Great, just like the NYC Deli’s I grew up with and 2. Doesn’t taste like the Jewish Deli I grew up with in NYC.”
Sounds about right.
Sacramento seems to be having a deli moment: Across town, the Bee reports, restaurateur N’Gina Kavookjian plans to open The Proletariat, an East Coast-inspired Jewish deli and “an homage to my Polish-Jewish husband and his New Jersey ways.”
Stay tuned.
More Dish of the Day
Michael Kaminer is a contributing editor at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected]
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Naftali Bennett is back: Former Israeli prime minister will make another run at Netanyahu
-
Fast Forward Citing post-Holocaust doctrine, Germany seeks to deport 4 pro-Palestinian protesters, including one American
-
Fast Forward Trump administration freezes research funding to Princeton amid antisemitism investigations
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.