Before Guns N' Roses Became Famous, The Band Hung Out At An Iconic LA Deli. This Is What They Ate There

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Let's take a trip back in music history. The setting: LA's Fairfax District, 1985. You're sitting in a comfy booth at a Los Angeles eatery that smells like pastrami and cigarettes (because it's the '80s). In the next booth, there's a quintet of 20-somethings with blown-out hairdos, looking like they've just stumbled in after hitchhiking over 1,000 miles — because they have. The crew is Guns N' Roses, and the restaurant is Canter's Deli. 

Canter's is one of the LA delis that locals depend on, hosting innumerable celebs over the decades; even Marilyn Monroe came here for her go-to sandwich. But in 1985, Guns N' Roses was still just another struggling band hoping to hit the big time. Fortunately for them, the group had an inside connection: Marc Canter. Canter is the third-generation owner of this 95-year-old culinary landmark. In the early '80s, he was a teenage amateur photographer hanging out with his best friend, an aspiring lead guitarist named Saul Hudson. In just a few short years, Hudson would become better known as Slash — and the name Guns N' Roses would become ubiquitous in rock 'n' roll. 

Today, Canter is the author of "Reckless Road" — his book about the band's rise to glory while entrenched in the gritty mid-'80s LA scene, an ascension he personally chronicled as an OG fan from day one. Tasting Table scored an exclusive interview with Canter to find out what the budding rockers liked to eat at the deli back in these early days, satiating their literal appetites while working on what would become their breakthrough debut album, "Appetite for Destruction."

"When Slash joined Hollywood Rose a year before Guns N' Roses, all the guys would hang out at Canter's, since the food was free for them," Marc Canter tells us. "A year later, in June of 1985, when Guns N' Roses got back from what was called Hell Tour — since their car broke down and they had to hitchhike to get up north — the band's first stop was at Canter's Deli, for two reasons: to get a good meal and to take a photo shoot, since they got a gig to be the bottom of four bands at the Stardust Ballroom." The resulting picture of Axl Rose, Duff McKagan, Izzy Stradlin, Steven Adler, and Slash in that Canter's booth is now an iconic image of rock legend.

Back then, the band members often survived on the deli's sustenance. According to Canter, Slash has been continually dining there since he moved to Los Angeles from London as a wild child in the early 1970s, coming to the restaurant with his parents. "Back in the old days Slash liked a pastrami sandwich, but now he gets the corned beef sandwich," Canter reveals. As for singer and frontman Axl Rose, Canter says: "Slash's girlfriend told me that she used to share tuna sandwiches with Axl there all the time." 

Izzy Stradlin (a high school friend of Axl Rose, and GNR's original rhythm guitarist) used to order the pastrami sandwich with fries, as Canter recalls. Perhaps predictably, the band's rhythm section switched things up. Drummer Steven Adler opted for Canter's pastrami-based Brooklyn Avenue sandwich (topped with coleslaw and Russian dressing) — and from the '80s to this day, according to Canter, bassist Duff McKagan regularly gets the deli's barley bean soup. 

For Guns N' Roses, Canter's Deli served as an early summit of creative import and an unofficial clubhouse. The eatery is where Slash and Steven Adler first met Duff McKagan in 1984, according to Marc Canter. "Slash placed an ad in the Recycler for a bass player right after Hollywood Rose fell apart. We [met McKagan while] sitting in the booth that is now called the Obama Booth, since Obama sat there to eat in 2014," he says — and even after becoming world-famous, Slash jammed at the deli's Kibitz Room bar twice in 1992.

Not long after that fateful photo shoot, the band signed to Geffen Records in 1986 — and Canter's Deli and Marc remained pillars throughout. In an interview posted to the "Reckless Road" website, McKagan calls Canter "the sixth member of the band," noting his prominent role in the group's history, "especially in the early days when he was really the only guy who cared about the band outside of the guys in the band. I think he believed in us from the beginning."

Today, Guns N' Roses fans consider Canter's Deli as an LA pilgrimage destination. According to Canter, guests ask to sit in the booth where that photo was taken multiple times each day, hoping to get a taste of the spirit that fueled the group's musical shenanigans of lore — like completing a tour almost entirely by hitchhiking, then ending the trip with a pastrami dinner.