Archie's Deli is owned and run by the Wright family from Detroit, who are not Jewish but grew up eating great deli food in the Midwest, where they were in the restaurant business for many years. A few years back, they moved to Phoenix and opened a deli at 59th Avenue and Thunderbird, which they closed when they moved to Surprise last February.

If the grease and grunge of some ancient deli from your childhood make you nostalgic, I sympathize. But I'll take the clean, upscale-diner ambiance of Archie's over bad housekeeping any day. Picture windows, painted with advertisements for what's inside, keep the open room bright and cheerful, while the display case near the front door offers enough tempting homemade desserts to make diners think twice about polishing off an entire sandwich (no small feat in the first place).

The first thing to hit the table is a complimentary dish of juicy, crunchy dill pickles - two kinds - plus my favorite, super-sour, super-garlicky green tomatoes. They're gone long before my friends and I can finish reading the nine-page menu, one page devoted to breakfast (blintzes and bagel sandwiches, mostly), the rest to sandwiches, salads, a few classic entrees and deli specialties such as knish and chopped liver.

Served with utterly addictive bagel chips and sliced white onion, the chopped liver, mixed with tiny bits of hard-cooked egg and onion, is all it should be: rich, smooth and slightly grainy ($5.25). I could eat it by the pound, and lucky me, it's sold that way for take-out ($8.99).

I'm far less enamored of potato knish, a giant mound of peppery mashed potato and onion, wrapped in oven-browned puff pastry ($3.25). Admittedly, knishes come in many wrappers with many fillings. I just happen to prefer mine smaller and crunchier.

But we're back on track with chicken soup, its rich, long-simmered stock chock full of chicken, carrot, celery and onion. We've ordered ours with kreplach (filled dumpings, similar to Chinese wontons), which have broken apart as they've simmered in the broth. I'm sure that's a no-no for somebody's persnickety grandma, but for the rest of us, this is wonderful, restorative stuff ($4.99, bowl).

If there's one sandwich you shouldn't miss, it's Archie's Reuben, piled high with moist corned beef, Swiss cheese and sauerkraut on double-baked rye bread, grilled and smeared with Russian dressing ($10.95). It's a messy, dripping bit of bliss, requiring multiple napkins, as is its pastrami-filled cousin, dubbed J.P.'s Pastrami Special: grilled rye bread smeared with mustard and heaped with hot pastrami, sweet caramelized onions and melted Swiss ($10.95).

According to Archie's Web site, Dolores's Treat (chunky chicken salad with smoked bacon and lettuce on mayo-spread challah ($8.95) and Al's Excuse (a fancy grilled cheese involving Muenster, fresh avocado spread, roasted green chile and tomato on grilled farm bread, $9.95) are customer favorites.

The chicken salad is first-rate, but the grilled cheese simply doesn't thrill the way the meaty sandwiches do. Then again, I'm not a vegetarian. But here's a plus: Archie's crisp, fresh-tasting cole slaw and mustard-y redskin potato salad are the hands-down best deli sandwich accompaniments in town.

Served in generous slices and ladled with brown gravy, fork-tender brisket is tasty too, especially with golden-brown and slightly greasy potato pancake, crisped around the edges ($12.95). But the Bosanova platter, containing lox, a dab of smoked whitefish salad, cream cheese, onion, capers and tomato, accompanied by a dense, chewy bagel from New York Bagels 'N Bialys ($9.95) is so yummy I wonder why I don't eat this scrumptious old favorite more often (ummm . . . the calories?).

I'm inevitably too full for desserts here but can't seem to resist an ultra-tart, powdered sugar-dusted lemon bar ($2.49), a fat chocolate sandwich cookie filled with drifts of housemade marshmallow (called a whoopie pie, $3.50) or the creamiest best noodle kugel I've ever had ($3.50).

I'm dreaming of that chicken soup (and maybe just a bite of noodle kugel) right now.

- Nikki Buchanan, The Arizona Republic, Nov. 5, 2009