by David Sax
Jewish talent often brought gentile friends for an introduction to the world of Jewish food. No longer was Max Asnas cracking in his native Yiddish to exclusively Jewish clientele. Instead, he served them sandwiches of corned beef with cheese on top and, if they so wanted it, a tall glass of milk. Many New York delis were known for flagrantly treyf foods. Take the Reuben sandwich, probably the most famous deli combination sandwich ever. Invented at Reuben’s Delicatessen on 58th Street, it combined hot corned beef, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing on grilled dark rye with a layer of melted Swiss cheese. It was the sacrifice many New York delicatessens felt they needed to make to gain a foothold in the mouths of gentile America. Few were going to put up a fuss if a little sacrilege was required to gain a level of acceptance and appreciation for their food and culture that Jews had never known before.
Through the Great Depression, many delis were able to survive by promoting their thrift. At a deli, cash-strapped workers could usually afford at least soup, a small hot dog, or a knish. The hard nubs of salami were placed in a bowl on the deli counter and sold for a “nickel a shtikl.” Once World War II broke out, the sons of deli owners went off to fight, and delis sold bonds to support them. A waiter named Louis Schwartz, who worked at the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen (between 55th and 56th streets), sold an astonishing nine million dollars in war bonds, mostly to customers. His efforts paid for 66 P-47 Thunderbird fighter planes, each of which sported the name Louis the Waiter as they sped into battle. Schwartz’s key sales pitch was a little rhyme that urged patrons to “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army.” Sixth Avenue Delicatessen shipped salamis overseas to troops, and soon other delis around the city were following the practice, especially Katz’s, which many people attribute as the originator of the slogan. Katz’s still ships salamis to U.S. troops stationed anywhere in the world.
When World War II ended, it triggered a significant shift for American Jews. No, they couldn’t quite yet join the country clubs, but many Jewish Americans were no longer regarded as outsiders. The 1944 gi Bill helped level the economic playing field, paving the way for American Jews to earn college degrees, buy cars or homes, and start businesses. As their parents had moved from the Lower East Side to the Bronx and Brooklyn, now those who grew up in those boroughs hopped bridges and settled the wilds of Long Island, New Jersey, Staten Island, and Westchester, where new pre-built subdivisions like Levittown kicked off America’s suburbanization. Delicatessens followed, opening in new strip malls and shopping plazas. It was the start of the golden era of American Jewry, and people reveled in the success of excess.
However, the postwar years held a bitter edge for America’s Jews, and precipitated the decline of the deli just as it reached its zenith. One only had to visit the long counter at Katz’s Delicatessen to see them . . . the survivors. They gazed ahead with distant eyes, slicing meat with forearms marked by smudged blue numbers. By 1945, the Nazis had accomplished what centuries of pogroms and royal decrees had not. They had rid Eastern and Central Europe of its Jews. Those who survived fled abroad, went to Israel, or were swallowed behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain. By the 1950s, there would be no more waves of Eastern European Jews moving to New York and opening delicatessens. From that moment on, the deli was severed from the land and tradition of the old country forever, and the Jewish delicatessen in New York would never grow again. While the postwar era was a boom time for American Jews, for the New York Jewish deli, it marked the beginning of the end.
The first blow came with the rise of the supermarket, which consolidated separate errands to the baker, delicatessen, butcher, and grocer. Those in Jewish areas set up large deli counters, with cheaper, mass-produced meats. So what if the corned beef tasted like SPAM? You could just pair it with a Gabilla frozen knish, which came in little oven-ready squares. In fact, by the late 1950s, a housewife on Long Island could fill her cart with prepared, preserved, frozen, or canned kosher Jewish foods ranging from Crisco vegetable shortening (eliminating the need for schmaltz), to Manischewitz bottled gefilte fish and powdered matzo ball soup mix (eliminating the need to cook). American Jewish households began replacing fresh breads and stewed meats with reconstituted variations of cornstarch and other artificial colors and flavors. Jews were less interested in tradition than they were in convenience. As postwar America’s flavors became more homogenized, so too did the deli’s.
Jewish food became more palatable to gentiles as well, with advertising campaigns that reached out beyond the Jewish community. The two most famous were the Hebrew National slogan “We Answer to a Higher Authority,” which sold the image that their hot dogs were cleaner than the gentile competition because they were kosher. The other summed up the new reality perfectly: the Brooklyn Commercial Bakery changed its product name to Levy’s Jewish Rye and promptly posted advertisements all over the subways, declaring, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”
Today, the glatt kosher market, which follows the regular kosher market by a decade or so in product innovation, is at this point. When I went to New York’s Kosherfest, the world’s largest kosher food trade show, there were kosher gummi bears; kosher barbecue sauce; kosher non-dairy ice cream; kosher frozen pizzas; kosher beef jerky; kosher mock bacon; and kosher mock shrimp, crab, and other pseudo-shellfish. There were giant booths devoted to the new flavors of glatt kosher cold cuts, but the focus was on mesquite chicken and Thai turkey, rather than pastrami or corned beef, all of it heavily processed.
Among such offerings there was very little food you would find in a delicatessen: a pickle guy, a few black and white cookies, some hot dogs, and a bored representative from the Gold’s horseradish family. The glatt kosher restaurant world is no different. Delicatessens such as Gottlieb’s, or the Noah’s Ark chain from New Jersey, are vastly outnumbered by glatt kosher Middle Eastern, French, Japanese, and Chinese restaurants.
The second change of the postwar era took shape as New York City began to decline economically. The Big Apple’s population peaked in 1950, when the effects of suburbanization began to alter the makeup of the city. Television began its migration to Hollywood. This had the effect of emptying the once-packed celebrity delicatessens around 7th Avenue of their famous faces. Ordinary people flocked to these delis to look at the pictures of celebrities who used to sit at the counter. Times Square became a haven for prostitution and porn as Broadway lost its crowds to suburban movie theaters.
The situation in the outer boroughs wasn’t much better. Both Brooklyn and the Bronx can mark their nadirs by events in baseball. For Brooklyn, the date was September 25, 1957, when the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers left for Los Angeles. For the Bronx, the low point came during the 1977 World Series. When the abc blimp panned past Yankee Stadium to focus on a large fire raging out of control, sportscaster Howard Cosell famously remarked, “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” Following that summer’s violent blackout, Cosell’s quip seemed to confirm that New York was a Dante-worthy hellhole. New York City was nearly bankrupt. Though the 1980s offered some upswing in the economy, crime continued to rise, as did homelessness. The Lower East Side and the East Village were no-go zones at night, home to junkies and street gangs. Riding the subway was perceived as a genuine threat to your health. In neighborhoods that were once thriving with Jewish life, slums plagued by violence and poverty became the norm. This was no easy place for a delicatessen to survive.
It wasn’t until midway through Rudy Giuliani’s term as mayor in the mid-1990s that things began to turn around significantly. Through a mixture of increased policing and economic factors beyond Giuliani’s control, the city rebounded to new heights, revitalizing much of Manhattan. Tourism returned to Midtown, and Brooklyn once again became a desirable place to live. Not even the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center could dent New York’s rise. But for the Jewish deli, the damage was irreversible.
Delicatessens had begun declining drastically with the move to the suburbs. According to the historian Ted Merwin, there w
ere only 150 kosher delicatessens listed in the five boroughs by 1960. Even if non-kosher delicatessens, which were increasingly dominating the market, were factored in, the number was no higher than three hundred or so, a decline of roughly 85 per cent in just three decades. Today, there are but a few dozen Jewish delis scattered around New York City, perhaps a dozen or so in all of Manhattan, two in the Bronx, two in Queens, and five or six in Brooklyn. Those in Manhattan cater mostly to tourists, and elsewhere the rest are barely hanging on. In less than a century and a half, the Jewish delicatessen came to New York, multiplied like crazy, and died off even faster. In fifty years’ time, it is possible that no delis will exist at all in New York City.
Formica Philosophy: Why New York Needs Its Jewish Delicatessen
Ask a friend about his or her first trip to New York, and most likely it will include a story about a delicatessen. On my first visit to Manhattan at sixteen, my parents whisked me directly from the airport to dinner at the Carnegie Deli. We could have eaten anywhere, but they wanted to take me someplace special. Though I’ve enjoyed great meals at a number of New York restaurants, from obscure Brooklyn bistros to the linen-covered tables of Daniel Boulud, those tend to fade from my memory rather quickly. I certainly recall the experience: the wait in the opulent lobby, the pearly smile of the hostess, the bejeweled diners, but if you ask me what I ate, I couldn’t possibly tell you.
But not deli. I have met hundreds of people who can recall with precise detail a salami sandwich they had half a century ago. Deli is one of the few restaurant experiences on par with home-cooked meals, a realm of warmth so sensually rewarding that it remains with us throughout our lives. Why is this? What differentiates the Jewish delicatessen from other restaurants, and what purpose does the Jewish delicatessen fulfill in our lives? Why does delicatessen food resonate so deeply with us, and what type of relationship do we have to the delicatessen? If the Jewish deli indeed is in decline, what will New York be losing if it disappears?
“Delis are big, vibrant places where people eat enormous portions of big salty meats. Where fat is prized . . . revered.”
So said Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet magazine and the former restaurant critic of the New York Times. Playing with a set of metal pickup sticks in her office, Ms. Reichl was recalling a particular deli sandwich she had eaten as a child—“I wasn’t just eating this wonderfully delicious, fatty sandwich. I was eating my own history. . . . It’s sort of everything that as human beings we’re trained to like; it’s fat and salt and sweet at the same time”—adding in a hushed tone, “How could you not like it?”
And how couldn’t you? I have introduced enough first-time delicatessen eaters to the joys of corned beef to know it’s a slamdunk almost every time. I know macrobiotic health nuts who will leave the fat on a brisket out of respect for the taste, and more than a few vegetarians who have returned to the carnivorous world by way of a pastrami sandwich—reviving their kale-deadened taste buds, bite by greasy bite. A lot of foods taste great, including the delicatessens of other cultures. But much as I love veal sandwiches, burgers, falafels, and tacos al pastor, none of those foods transmit the caloric embrace of a Jewish deli.
In delis, people see life. They see hope. They smell comfort. Each of the delicatessens I visited in New York had stories from the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when regular customers came by in droves. The world they’d known was literally tumbling down, and their first reaction was to seek out the comforting certainty of matzo ball soup and cabbage rolls. In delis, New Yorkers taste love. Love for food, love for friends, and occasionally, aphrodisiacal moments of pure, physical passion, like Meg Ryan’s “I’ll have what she’s having” orgasm in When Harry Met Sally, or George Costanza’s “I find the pastrami to be the most sensual of all the salted cured meats.”
There is also a certain restorative property to deli. “It’s the idea of that old-world food,” said my friend Gail Simmons, an editor at Food and Wine magazine, and a judge on the hit reality cooking show Top Chef. Carving up an overflowing open-faced brisket Reuben at Artie’s Delicatessen on the Upper West Side, she extolled the virtues of such survivalist cuisine: “This was the food of Eastern European firebreathers. It is pure comfort food, preserved and pickled to outlast anything.” When New Yorkers are sick, they’ll fight their seasonal ailments with jars of soup, containers of chopped liver, and dense kugels. As a form of health care, it’s cheaper than most every other option, and the side effects from a combination of kasha and knish are virtually nil.
In some instances, deli can actually save lives. Take the case of Harris Salat, a food writer who fought off cancer a few years back. “I didn’t really plan on doing it, but the first time I came back in the taxi from chemotherapy I spotted the Katz’s sign like a beacon and I just had to stop there.” Salat would go by Katz’s after every treatment, loading up on pastrami sandwiches, which would sustain him for days. Amazingly, while most chemotherapy patients shed weight, Salat gained thirty pounds. “I didn’t go to Katz’s with some grand ideas in mind. It just felt right and felt good. I’d be weak and I’d buy a big bag of food there and I’d munch on it. It was like a Jewish power bar.”
Even in death, deli is there. A steaming sandwich snuck in past watchful nurses conveys an immeasurable gesture of love. Sadly, this is not something reserved for elderly Jews. While staying with my friend Christopher Farber in Brooklyn, I met Drew Goren. A talented young photographer, Goren was in the terminal stages of cancer in November 2006. Rail thin, he could hardly move without inducing some form of pain and his appetite was almost nonexistent. But we talked for hours about New York’s delicatessens. Weeks later, as he lay dying in the hospital, Farber brought him a large order of Sammy’s Romanian Steakhouse’s famous schmaltz-heavy chopped liver, loaded with fried onions and shredded radish. Goren devoured it with gusto, a content smile beaming across his face in what was undoubtedly the last, and best, deli meal of his life.
Though Jewish weddings and bar mitzvahs are now more likely to feature sushi bars than a tray of cold cuts, the one event where delicatessen food is almost always present is the shiva. When a Jew dies, the immediate family is obliged to host a mourning period over the course of a week. Friends will send meals, quite often from a local deli. Catharsis in a platter of sliced tongue may seem like a cheap way to cope with death, but it is surprisingly effective. Ben’s, a chain of kosher delis based in Long Island, even has a separate Condolence Catering and Coordinated Shiva Service department. The shiva catering options at Ben’s lean toward the hearty—soups, roast chicken, stuffed cabbage, brisket, Hungarian goulash, cold cuts, and heavy noodle puddings.
I asked Ben’s owner, Ronnie Dragoon, why these foods tended to dominate shivas, even if the deceased were not deli eaters. “Because that’s when they feel most attached to the tradition,” he said. “Rites of passage typically make that bond stronger.” It is fitting, then, that the other rite of passage where delicatessen food dominates in the Jewish life cycle happens to be at the bris (circumcision) or baby-naming ceremonies. From birth to death, enshrined in deli. What other restaurant offers cradle-to-grave service?
Over the past century, the setting of the New York Jewish deli has been finely crafted, complete with its characters, rituals, and symbols. How delis look and smell, who works there, and how they treat you are the key elements delineating a Jewish delicatessen from any other sandwich shop. They are decorated in what one owner called “utilitarian chic,” and everything serves a purpose. Formica tables and sturdy metal or wooden chairs are favored because they are nearly indestructible. Tablecloths are pointless, as deli is a meal of spills. Cutlery should be slightly bent. The occasional chipped dish establishes credibility. Deli tables are almost always square and packed together tightly. Lights should burn so brightly that the difference between night and day cannot be discerned. Floors are best made up of black and white tiles laid in a checkerboard pattern. Walls can be decorated with old photographs of the deli owner’s family, o
r faded celebrities, or both, as well as nostalgic posters of New York.
Like blue jeans, delicatessens need to straddle a fine line between comfortably haggard and respectable. Jewish delicatessens that gleam too brightly are suspect. “I can’t eat in that place,” deli customers will say of the sterile specimen, “it feels like a hospital cafeteria.” They want a deli to feel lived in. They want an institution. A certain amount of schmutz, the Yiddish word literally meaning dirt, is highly prized; perhaps a few scraps of meat around the cutting machine, or a little grime trimming the ceiling tiles, but never too much, because delis can overdo the schmutz, and many in New York regularly do, sentenced forever by an avalanche of complaints. “You want to eat at Sax’s?” they’ll question in astonishment. “I’d never set foot in that place, even if I was forcibly dragged there by Hezbollah. It’s filthy!” If the toilets dare exhibit a level of sanitation any less than a Japanese nuclear plant, no Jew will ever eat there. Period.
The most important thing to fill the physical space of a Jewish delicatessen, besides the food, is its people:
The Owner/Manager: When Sandy Levine walks around the tables at the Carnegie Delicatessen, everyone gets a greeting, a handshake, and a dose of shtick. “Where ya from?” he’ll say, working the crowds of tourists. If someone says Hawaii, he’ll joke about surfing. If it’s Ireland, he’ll drop the name of a famous bar there. He’ll laugh with the roar of an elephant and play with a giant plastic pickle. “Rosie!” Levine will yell, and a diminutive Chinese waitress runs over. “I’m doing a picture, comb my hair.” Levine will whip a worn plastic comb out of his pocket and, bending his six-foot-plus frame, he’ll present his head to five-foot-minus Rosie, who will comb the half dozen strands over the shiny dome of Levine’s scalp to the roar of the crowd. When they return to Omaha or Osaka, they will surely talk about the crazy owner of the Carnegie Delicatessen and make a note to return the next time they are in New York.