Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  Bernamoff chose to open his restaurants in neighborhoods that are, as he put it, “not oriented toward traditional deli customers” but instead toward a younger, more adventurous clientele. Most of his customers are not Jewish; many are experiencing the taste of deli for the first time. “We’re making food that is not about nostalgia,” he said, “but simply about the experience of eating.” He said that he is grateful to the food writers in New York, who have compared his restaurant not to other delis but to other non-Jewish restaurants that serve gourmet food.35 He has also recently started selling craft beers, including smoked beer from a German brewery.36

  Bernamoff also knows that eating in a Jewish deli is about much more than the food itself. Mile End self-consciously attempts to re-create what Bernamoff terms the “deli culture” of Montreal, what he calls “the culture of going out on Sundays and having bagels and lox, or getting eggs and bacon.” He describes his family’s tradition of eating out for Sunday brunch as “very ritualistic,” explaining, “the strength of that ritual was what I was really trying to bring to Mile End when we first opened.” He thoughtfully adds that in order for a restaurant to succeed, it has to embody the personality of its owner; the restaurant “has to be an extension of yourself, it has to represent those aspects of yourself that you want to celebrate. It’s so much more than just serving food to people.”37 As he told the Times, “When I see tourists going into Katz’s, I feel a kind of rage. This is the food of my people, and places like that are turning it into a joke.”38

  It is ironic that for Jewish deli food to be what Bernamoff calls the “food of my people,” it needs to be prepared in a way that corresponds as much to contemporary (basically secular) values as to ancestral (mostly religious) ones. As he put it, even younger Jews nowadays “expect deli food, like holiday food, to be glued in time.” What they do not realize, he said, is that these foods can be updated and still retain the “rustic, comforting, familiar” flavor and appearance of foods that are based in an ethnic culture, whether it be Jewish, Italian, or Chinese. “I have no Italian roots whatsoever,” he said, “but I can still enjoy rich, warming Italian food.”39 Bernamoff’s latest venture, Black Seed Bagels, brings Montreal-style bagels to New York, where they have begun to attract a wide following.

  As in Israel, where gourmet pork and shellfish dishes are increasingly marketed to middle- and high-end Jewish customers, Jewish restaurants in New York have begun to incorporate aggressively nonkosher food into deli fare. While it is obviously nothing new for a (nonkosher) Jewish deli to serve such food, the emphasis here is self-consciously and ironically on identity and assimilation. This irony extends well beyond the world of delis; at JoeDough (a sandwich-shop version of the upscale restaurant JoeDoe), Irish American owner Joe Dobias serves The Conflicted Jew—chicken liver, onion, and bacon on challah. The late cookbook author Gil Marks, while comparing the consumption of such a concoction by a Jew to “an American eating a horse,” also recognized that eating such a sandwich can represent an ongoing connection to tradition, if only in the act of struggling to free oneself from it. “You always retain your roots, to a certain extent, no matter how hard you try to reject them,” he observed.40

  Similar issues pertain to Traif, a restaurant in Williamsburg (where many ultra-Orthodox Jews live) owned by a Jewish chef named Jason Marcus, which pushes the envelope quite boldly by advertising itself as “celebrating pork, shellfish, and globally-inspired soul food.” A recent dinner menu at Traif included shiso-bacon-wrapped skate tempura, scallop carpaccio, charred baby octopus, and braised Berkshire pork cheek. And for dessert? Donuts sprinkled with bacon crumbs. Marcus once confided that his restaurant is quite popular with ex-Hasidic Jews; a renegade Hasid even showed up in a van in the middle of the night for a take-out order of the eatery’s pork specialties.41

  Nor does one need to eat at a deli per se in order to eat foods inspired by the Jewish deli. Kutsher’s Tribeca (an outpost of the famed Catskills hotel, the last of the great Jewish resorts in upstate New York), which calls itself a “modern Jewish American bistro,” serves such entrees as pot-roasted beef flanken, wild mushroom and fresh ricotta kreplach, and—a modern version of gefilte fish—diced wild halibut poached in fish stock. It also serves a deli charcuterie platter (on a wooden board) of pastrami, smoked veal tongue, salami, duck pastrami, and chopped liver—most of which are cured and smoked in house—along with homemade celery soda.

  Adeena Sussman of the Forward newspaper has dubbed such culinary reinventions “haute haimish grub”42—examples of which are cropping up everywhere in New York, such as the celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s kasha varnishkes (served with veal meatballs) at ABC Kitchen, the caviar knish at Torrisi Italian Specialties, and the Deli Ramen at Josh Kaplan’s restaurant, Dassara, a dish that is composed of Japanese noodle soup with matzoh balls and strips of smoked meat. Such newfangled Jewish dishes are not entirely new; one thinks of the fusion between Jewish and Chinese food that is exemplified by the pastrami egg rolls and Chinese hot dogs at Eden Wok. But the gourmetization of Jewish food represents a different stage in its evolution; it suggests that Jewish food is wide open to reinterpretation and that one can play with the boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish food while also playing with the distinctions between the upscale and the ethnic. Perhaps the best example is at Vinegar Hill House in Brooklyn: the stuffed cabbage is filled with curried goat, lima beans, and spinach.43

  Delis throughout the country continue to trade on the association of “New York” with deli authenticity. This appears to be a particularly trendy concept in the Southwest, where former New Yorkers—or their descendants—have opened Kenny and Ziggy’s New York Delicatessen Restaurant in Houston, New York Deli News in Denver, Chompie’s New York Deli in Phoenix, and many others. (Nor is this phenomenon limited to the United States; there are “New York” delis in London, Cardiff, Tokyo, Jakarta, and scores of other cities around the globe.) The “New York” deli connotes a turn-back-the-clock, back-to-the-source quality. It suggests a style of restaurant notable for overstuffed sandwiches, eastern European Jewish dishes, the delirious scent of pickle brine, and an ambience that is loud, crowded, busy, and lively.

  Indeed, by advertising a store or restaurant as one serving “New York” food—whether deli sandwiches, bagels, or pizza—the owner implicitly suggests that this is where that type of food originated, where it reached its highest quality, or where it became most famous. Many of these restaurants also put New York memorabilia up on their walls, such as playbills, caricatures of stage stars, and photographs of New York landmarks.

  Nor do “New York” delis need be very far from New York. The Carnegie Deli has an outpost in the Sands Casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where busloads of Chinese immigrants from New York arrive daily to play the slots—and perhaps eat a pastrami sandwich. Harold’s New York Deli in Edison, New Jersey, takes the supersize concept to its logical extreme, serving sandwiches, soups, and cakes that are so mammoth that one is more than enough for an entire table of diners. The experience of eating at Harold’s reminded an Asian American food blogger, Mary Kong-Devito, of Alice in Wonderland; she joked that she “felt like a shrunken Alice at The Mad Hattowitz’s Tea Party.” She described the matzoh ball soup as “over sixty ounces of chicken soup, carrots, celery, chunk white chicken and a matzo ball bigger than Leonard Bernstein’s head.” The sandwiches, she reported, are “so enormous that you could share with a village.”44

  It is also striking that delis, especially nonkosher ones, are persistently, if rather tongue-in-cheek, described in religious terms. One of the African American slicers at Katz’s is nicknamed the “Reverend of Pastrami,” as if the deli counter is his church and the customers his congregants. Perhaps not coincidentally, the “reverend” presides over the same deli that New York magazine described as a “shrine, the soul of American Jewish cuisine” when it was rumored a few years ago that the building in which Katz is housed was being bought by real estate developers.45 Th
at the Jewish deli became an analogue to the synagogue, or even to the Temple in Jerusalem, has been suggested throughout this book. But it is striking that the deli sandwich is still imbued with so much quasi-religious symbolism, and it speaks to the intensity of the ambivalence that so many secular Jews still have about their religion, to the extent that this kind of humor still carries a charge.

  Given that Jews are no longer a reliable customer base for Jewish delis, the delis that are going strong appeal largely to tourists. After reopening in midtown on Third Avenue and Thirty-Third Street, the Second Avenue Deli (still using its trademark sign of faux Hebrew or Yiddish letters) recently added a second branch on First Avenue and Seventy-Fifth Street. These locations, neither of which is actually on Second Avenue, have a very different vibe from the East Village; the Lower East Side, countercultural feel that the deli enjoyed for so many years is gone. To the extent that New York remains a city of distinct neighborhoods (this is a question in itself, given gentrification, the rise in real estate prices, and the proliferation of chain stores and franchises), a deli that is wrenched out of its original location and plopped down in a different part of the city is like a plant that has to grow new roots.

  The very idea that the deli’s name and the food that it offers are more important than its physical location represents a reversal of the whole concept of the traditional deli, where both the menu and the quality of the food were both fairly standard whatever deli you visited, and what mattered far more was where the deli was and the social network that it nurtured and that supported it in turn. The idea that you could put the Second Avenue Deli anywhere in the city and it would still be the Second Avenue Deli suggests that a deli is all about the food and the ambience and not about its embeddedness in community. The deli’s customers thus pay for the privilege of becoming walking advertisements for the restaurant, while also showing off that they know where to get a good pastrami sandwich. Not that the neighborhood vibe doesn’t exist at the Second Avenue Deli—people do seem to feel comfortable striking up conversations with total strangers who are sitting at neighboring tables. But, in a concession to contemporary restaurant etiquette, the waiters at the Second Avenue Deli, some of whom are old-time deli waiters, are instructed to be careful in dealing with customers and to refrain from insulting, or joking with, them.

  The few kosher delis left in the outer boroughs do still serve, to some extent, as neighborhood hangouts. These include Jay and Lloyd’s in Brooklyn, Ben’s Best in Queens, and Liebman’s in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. (There are no kosher delis left on Staten Island; Golden’s, which was notable for having a real 1936 subway car plunked down in the middle of the restaurant, where it served as a small dining room, closed in early 2012.)46 But in order to remain in business, even these off-the-beaten-track places have had to morph into “destination” restaurants; Ben’s Best has been visited by George W. Bush, featured on Martha Stewart’s television show, and appeared on the Food Network. This media attention gives Ben’s Best the aura of celebrity that was so much a part of the appeal of the nonkosher delis in the theater district. But rather than helping the customer feel special, as Jews so badly needed to do in the early to mid-twentieth century, the deli makes the customer feel like a tourist to a shrine—to a place that has been sacralized by its media exposure.

  Some of the nostalgia for the Jewish deli is for the time in which Jews from across the political and ideological spectrum regularly broke bread together. For a major split has regrettably occurred within the American Jewish community, with few Jewish contexts now present in which religious and secular Jews meet on a regular basis. In addition, most traditionally minded Jews are unwilling to eat in delis that are open on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and less observant Jews are unwilling to pay high prices (up to twenty dollars for a kosher soup-and-sandwich combination) for the privilege of eating kosher deli food. Except in smaller cities such as Memphis and St. Louis, where there are so few Jewish restaurants that the local kosher deli still attracts a wide range of customers, delis are less able to bridge differences between various types of Jews.

  Ethnic Jewishness of the standard eastern European variety is on a steep decline. Few Jews speak Yiddish any more, except in ultra-Orthodox enclaves in Brooklyn and upstate New York, where it remains the everyday language. Jewish theaters throughout the country struggle to find an audience. Films and television shows that include Jewish characters may have Jewish references but rarely have Jewish themes. Non-Jews often seem more attracted to Judaism than Jews themselves are, as reflected in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David’s character’s non-Jewish wife makes a Passover seder, despite his contemptuous attitude toward the ritual. In many ways, Jews seem to be waving farewell to the religion and culture that once sustained them and that once undergirded so much of American culture in general.

  One has only to glimpse the long lines of tourists waiting outside the Carnegie Deli in Times Square to appreciate that “destination” delis still play a role, if only to provide a taste of New York history to hungry tourists. The few remaining midtown delis, with their extravagant decor and overstuffed sandwiches, are still part of the uplifting of excess, the over-the-top quality of our popular culture. But the Jewishness of the Jewish deli has somewhat evaporated; indeed, a perusal of one hundred reviews revealed the mention of the word “Jewish” in only a small fraction of them. Much more likely to be mentioned was the fact that When Harry Met Sally was filmed there, suggesting that a knowledge of the deli scene in the film conditions customers’ experience of eating there as much as anything else.

  Many Ashkenazic Jews have embraced Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food in recent years, trading fatty deli foods for lighter dishes cooked in olive oil—dishes that tend to feature fruits and vegetables rather than meat. The longing for Jewish deli also reflects the fact that many “deli” foods—the term has become quite elastic—have now become so much a part of the overall American diet that soon few will remember that their consumption was once essentially limited to immigrant Jews and their children. Pastrami (or a cheap cut of beef that is spiced and smoked to resemble old-fashioned Jewish pastrami) is retailed at almost every Subway and Quiznos sandwich franchise, with posters showing how the meat is “piled high” on the bread, just as in a traditional Jewish deli. The mainstreaming of delicatessen food is almost complete. Not that certain deli dishes are likely to survive outside of New York and outside of a traditional delicatessen—foods like rolled beef, tongue, and stuffed derma (beef intestine filled with fat, flour, and water).

  Even the Second Avenue Deli is now selling smoked fish, which was traditionally reserved for appetizing stores. The word “deli” has lost its exclusive connection to meat, even in New York, to the extent that among the most famous “delis” in New York are Zabar’s (a take-out gourmet store and kitchenware emporium), Barney Greengrass (a bagel and smoked fish restaurant), and Russ and Daughters (an appetizing store).

  Assimilation, neighborhood change, the diversification of the American Jewish population, the constantly widening range of food choices—all have had a deleterious effect on the deli. As a waiter at Ratner’s reflected not long before the restaurant’s closing, “This area was once home to the most densely populated Jewish community in the world, and home to the world’s finest kosher cuisine. But these days, instead of high-rise chopped liver sandwiches on rye, we have high-rise buildings.”47

  As the delicatessen loses its primary place in American Jewish culture, Jewish food in general continues to assume an even greater place in the construction of American Jewish identity. There is much talk of “gastronomic” Jews or “bagel and lox Jews” (the term “pastrami Jew” has not yet been coined) who presumably connect to their Jewish identity chiefly through their stomachs. But, as discussed earlier, many Jewish foods—bagels are a prime example—have become so much part of the mainstream American diet that they have slipped their Jewish moorings. Outside of New York, even pastrami is beref
t of its Jewish associations. At my local gas station in central Pennsylvania, I can buy a hot pastrami, brisket, or corned beef sandwich from the self-service kiosk, and it will be made to order before my gas has finished pumping.

  Even in major cities, the delicatessen has become a museum piece, as exemplified in a 2006 exhibit in Philadelphia at the National Museum of American Jewish History. “Forshpeis! A Taste of the Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana” grouped memorabilia such as advertising signs, vintage kosher products, and cookbooks around iconic items such as a Formica-topped kitchen table and a deli counter. The counter was surrounded by menus, invoices, pickle crocks, a pillow in the shape of a Zion Kosher salami, and a counterman’s paper hat reading “Ask for Mrs. Weinberg’s Chopped Liver.” And a Jewish food exhibit in Baltimore, “Chosen Food,” which opened in 2011, featured items from my own collection, including a large neon sign from a shuttered New York deli called Pastrami Queen, a deli slicer and scale, and other memorabilia from delis throughout the country. Patrons could leave the exhibit and head around the corner to Attman’s, one of the few old-time Jewish delis that still exist in that city.