This summer, on an intensely sweaty night at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, the rapper Wiki started a chant. He began slowly, his twisted syllables gaining in speed and intensity, soon passing them back and forth onstage with his co-headliner Your Old Droog, who screamed them like a religious mantra until they were chanting in unison:

“Mayo lettuce onion pickle pepper cheddar honey mustard mozzarella jalapeno sausalito turkey on a roll!”

Soon, stagehands passed out foot-long sandwiches to the raucous crowd. Fans took a chomp and passed them down the line before jumping back in the mosh pit; after they left, shreds of lettuce and cheese scattered the floor, ground up by Jordans and Timbs.

There are few young rappers who embrace New York—its aesthetic, history, and mythology — as fervently as Wiki. Through 16 dense songs on his critically acclaimed debut album for XL, No Mountains in Manhattan, he skillfully mimics and transcends the city’s 1990s halcyon boom-bap era. He paints vivid tales of riding the subway, setting off firecrackers in Columbus Park, and smoking weed at the Apollo, slipping in shout-outs to Elaine Benes and Clyde Frazier. And most centrally, he rhapsodizes about the city’s food. If Jay-Z had the Lexus and Nas had the Tec on the dresser, Wiki has the deli sandwich. The complexity and interplay of its layers and textures signify everything Wiki loves about the city: its hustle, humility, and diversity. And with every food reference, Wiki plants a flag for his New York, screaming back against the homogenized, corporate version rapidly taking its place.

“Let me get that bacon egg and cheese right quick, look/I flip it today’s paper/Cadence making deli life entertainment” (“Made for This”)

I’m sitting with Wiki at the Mott Corner deli in Chinatown, a few days after the release of No Mountains in Manhattan. I’ve told Wiki he can pick any restaurant he wants, and on our walk over we pass a string of sleek, trendy, and surely delicious spots with names like The Butcher’s Daughter and LuAnne's Wild Ginger All-Asian Vegan. But delis are Wiki’s home. They are the first place he goes in the morning—usually for a bacon, egg, and cheese—and the last stop after a night out. They’re the site of his drunken brawls and quiet dates; one even became his daily bathroom outpost when his own apartment’s facilities broke last year.

Plenty of rappers have plunged headfirst into the food game, imbuing gourmet culture with their rowdy enthusiasm—most notably, Action Bronson and Snoop Dogg. But while these rappers delight in shaking up hallowed culinary spaces, Wiki takes a different approach by staying resolutely at the street level. “I’m not really an expert on food. I just like regular shit,” he says as we dig into the deli’s spicy special sandwich, one of his go-to meals in the area: shredded chicken cutlet, jalapenos, tomato, cheese, and lettuce on a roll. It stings pleasantly, the heat tempered by our 24-ounce bottles of Corona. It’s here that Wiki shot the music video for “Pretty Bull,” the album’s gleeful, teetering first single. In the video, Wiki dons an apron and works the fryer, serving sandwiches to his friends; later, he packs the tiny corner store full with revelers, sheds his shirt and jumps up onto the countertop to dance. “We were like, ‘Yo, you can take any beer you want.’ Everyone was immediately loose off it,” he recalls. Today, the deli staff gives knowing nods to Wiki and appears pretty blasé about the beer spraying, toilet paper throwing, and blunt smoking that ensued in the tiny confines. “We gave them some bread. They were down,” Wiki says with a shrug.