Save the Deli

by David Sax

  Where the clientele is more local, owners nurture an inherent familiarity with customers. Up in Riverdale, the leafy enclave of the west Bronx, Yuval Dekel continues the tradition of his late father at Liebman’s, a small, cozy kosher delicatessen that serves incredible homemade stuffed cabbage and “hush puppies,” which are mini-hot dogs wrapped in knish dough. With a largely local and elderly customer base, Dekel will deliver meals to their houses on Friday nights, and when they fail to come in, he will call to check up on their health. It’s not his job, strictly speaking, but in a way, it is his duty.

  The Counterman: Here is the field sergeant in the daily battles of a deli’s existence. Though he appears in the guise of an employee, decked out in grease-stained fatigues, the counterman is the single most important person in a delicatessen. He’s generally a no-nonsense man (I’ve yet to meet a counter-woman), whose deft ability with steaming meat and sharp blades is a source of wonder. Slim and harried, he’ll speak in short sentences drowning in sarcasm. The rarest of breeds is the owner/counterman. One of the few I’ve encountered was Freddy Loeser, the owner of Loeser’s Kosher Delicatessen in the West Bronx, a person who epitomizes what old-school New Yorkers once called a Deli Man, literally someone whose existence is wholly delicatessen. Having opened the deli with his bar mitzvah money in 1960, Freddy Loeser has managed to hang on in a neighborhood that’s lost much of its Jewish character. This is tough work, which is probably why Loeser himself is such a tough sob. Wearing a hangdog expression on a face like Alan Alda’s and a paper cap with his name written in pencil, Loeser set out to intimidate me from the moment I walked into his deli.

  “How the fuck did you find me?” he asked, as though I’d just uncovered a secret lair. Loeser’s was a relic so well preserved you could suffocate in atmosphere. There were faded family photos, old signs, clippings of political events, and handwritten notes from customers push-pinned to the wall. “I’m a natural, a switch hitter,” Loeser told me, glaring into my eyes to make sure I heard every word. “I got the best pastrami in New York, the best brisket, the best soup, the best everything.” He had the talk, the look, and the swagger of the consummate Deli Man—a creature disappearing with the deli itself, despite the self-assuredness of their own skills. And when he was done talking with me, he simply said, “Thanks for visiting,” and turned his back. As much as it should have offended me, I was delighted. Because a substantial part of the fading delicatessen experience is getting treated like shit.

  The Waiter: “You couldn’t live with them, and you couldn’t get a tongue sandwich without them. . . . They’d all been there ninety years, and none of those ninety years was any good.” (“Oldest Living” by Alan Richman, GQ, October 2000.)

  Richman’s ode to this vanished specimen perfectly captured the love-hate relationship between the Jewish delicatessen waiter and his/her clients. It was a battle of sullen service vs. constant kvetching, of walking misery vs. predetermined disappointment, but young Jewish men and women no longer view waiting deli tables as a lifetime occupation. “When I started [in the mid-1970s], 70 per cent of my staff were Jewish,” said Ronnie Dragoon, the owner of Ben’s. “I have customers complain and say, ‘This is disgraceful, you only have Hispanics working here!’ I say, ‘Listen, if you have a family member that wants to come to work for me, I’ll be more than happy to offer them a job. Just remember, they’ll work nights, they’ll work holidays . . .’ Then their tune changes. Who are you going to get to work here besides immigrants?”

  Today, the delicatessen waiter is more likely to be female, gentile, and foreign-born. They may schlep a little less, and though the hostility of the old days is largely done for, the attitude and antics have gone nowhere. The deli waiter will tell you what to order and how to order it. “We usually volunteer what’s best on the menu, we suggest what they should eat, what they should not eat, or if they’re over-ordering and getting too much food,” said Ida Berger, a former waitress at the 2nd Ave Deli. “Y’know, this is what you do in a deli, you don’t do that in a diner or another type of restaurant. In a Jewish deli, it’s more like a family.” At Katz’s, Carnegie, Stage, Ben’s Best (a kosher deli in Queen’s, unrelated to Ben’s) and the rest, there’s still plenty of attitude and shtick to go around.

  Deli Eaters: By far the most important character in the Jewish delicatessen is the customer. In the world of New York Jewry, the delicatessen once represented the third pole of Jewish life outside the home. It was a role divided in importance with the synagogue and the shvitz. Delis weren’t just restaurants to eat at, but places to exchange ideas and gossip, cut deals, network, and ruminate on the lessons of life. Commerce, social life, and politics all mixed and mingled at the cramped tables, where gangsters and street punks would break bread with bankers and lawyers. While the gentile power brokers had their country clubs and private dining rooms, the Jewish hustlers had their delis: the Stage was the haunt of show business, Lou G. Siegel’s attracted the fast-talking garment dealers, and Berger’s was the home of the diamond traders.

  When election time comes around in New York, the delicatessen remains a powerful symbol. Ed Koch, the Bronx-born mayor of New York from 1978 to 1989, has his photograph hanging in practically every Jewish deli in New York City. Mr. Koch, like most savvy politicians, learned early on the political value of eating a pastrami sandwich. “It’s a Jewish statement, and New York is an ethnic town,” he told me, sitting in his Rockefeller Center office. Every time he took a bite out of a knish for the cameras, he sent a message to the area’s Jewish constituents that Ed Koch was one of them. “Every politician does it,” Koch said. (Though not always with conviction. Both Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern made the mistake of ordering a glass of milk at kosher delis and hot dog stands, a gaffe that some say cost McGovern New York’s votes.)

  The specter of gentile politicians eating matzo balls reveals the major appeal of Jewish delicatessens to gentiles. It is one of the few places where you can instantly immerse yourself in an organic Jewish experience. Unlike the simple initiation rituals of Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism, conversion to Judaism requires the study and dedication of LSAT-style entrance exams (a fact not lost on Jewish mothers). The very environment of a delicatessen somehow ensures that everyone inside will eat Jewish (lots and fast), get treated Jewish (with tough, sarcastic love), and talk Jewish (loudly). So long as they do not order mayonnaise on the sandwich or ask for white bread, no one will call them out on their lack of Hebraic heritage.

  “A deli is guaranteed informality,” explained William Helmreich, a professor of sociology at CUNY Graduate Center in New York and a lifelong deli fanatic. “Every nationality can go in, and during that time, the interactions they have are very, very rich.” As we noshed away on pastrami and roast beef sandwiches at the back of the Kensington Kosher Delicatessen, in his hometown of Great Neck, Long Island, Helmreich outlined how the deli has evolved into a place to recharge on Jewish identity.

  “Younger [Jews] who go into delis are practicing something us sociologists call ‘symbolic ethnicity.’ When the real trappings of ethnicity are gone—language, religion, practices—by the third or fourth generation people look for symbolic ways to identify, and food is the easiest. When two Jews go to a deli, they’re ethnically bonding, expressing the common roots of our shared culture.”

  The same applied to other ethnicities. Italians venturing to Arthur Avenue for meatball sandwiches, Chinese Americans eating dim sum on Canal Street, or African Americans digging soul food in Harlem all served the same purposes. “In an era where everything changes fast, humans have a need to be rooted,” Helmreich continued, “which is why you see Orthodox Judaism having such a resurgent appeal. But for one who doesn’t want to be frum [orthodox], deli is the easy way. In the deli, you can walk in a goy and walk out a Jew . . . maybe a pound heavier.”

  With their numbers declining to dangerously low levels, Jewish delis now take on a different meaning for New York’s Jews as symbolic representations of a fading
past. “Why do we love these nostalgic places?” Helmreich asked me. Why is the sense of history, the unchanged decor, and the behavior of the waiters so important to the character of a Jewish deli? Helmreich saw that it was all about trying to stay true to who you were. When a person goes into a deli, he claimed, that individual is looking for authenticity. He is not just dreaming of the deli that he once went to when he was younger, but remembering what, and who, he once was. The young are validating the tradition of the Jewish delicatessen, even if they don’t realize it.

  Unfortunately, with each successive generation, as the number of delicatessens around New York has declined from thousands to mere dozens, the link between New York delis and New York Jews has grown perilously weak. The assimilation of New York’s Jewish population is one of the crucial factors that brought the Jewish delicatessen to its current endangered state. Having come from the very farthest margins of European society, where persecution and exclusion was the norm, the Jewish desire to blend in and achieve acceptance in a Christian-dominated nation remains strong. Victims of anti-Semitism feel far less secure about their status and are more likely to do what it takes to gain acceptance. Intermarriage, which made up only 6 per cent of Jewish unions in 1950, is today present in approximately half of American Jewish households and much higher in younger marriages. As a consequence, children born in mixed marriages are less likely to be raised as either religious or ethnic Jews. Soon, the number of American Jews who will participate in a Jewish religious institution will be the minority, and the unaffiliated will become the majority.

  Today’s Jewish youth are far less likely to eat at a delicatessen than their parents, who, in turn, were less likely to eat at delis than their own parents. A large part of this is attributed to eating habits, but we must keep in mind that these are the same generations characterized by soaring rates of obesity. They’re not forgoing deli for the salad bar, they’re ditching it for burgers and BBQ. The delicatessen is so far removed from their own weakened cultural identity that it has no resonance for them.

  “The Jewish deli will be a museum exhibit like at Ellis Island, with actors playing deli owners and everything.” This was the prediction of Joshua Neuman, the editor of the irreverent Jewish youth culture magazine HEEB. “What is this culture?” Neuman asked me, when we spoke of deli, over tacos. “People hated the shtetl. The second they could get into that country club and file down their noses . . . forget it!” Today’s Jews, Neuman believed, are looking to define their own experience in their own terms, not that of their grandparents. Neuman felt closer to a restaurant such as Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction (a “Judeo-Latin brasserie”) than a traditional delicatessen. “Mo Pitkin’s captures what’s happening,” Neuman said in late 2006. “It doesn’t resist [the decline of deli]. Instead it poeticizes the crumbling of the culture in the food. In a way it feels more real to drink a Manischevetini [a vodka martini with a splash of Manischewitz kosher wine], than to eat a sandwich at Katz’s. Katz’s seems like something a German tourist does to see what Jews do, like he saw in a Woody Allen movie.”

  Trying to hang on to a fading culture was what Neuman called a “tremendous waste of resources.” Nostalgic exercises, delicious or not, had no place in moving American Jewry forward. If the delicatessen had to die for that culture to be reborn, so be it. “I say nail in the coffin. Do it, let’s get over it,” Neuman remarked emphatically. “If we can live without animal sacrifice, we can live without the pastrami sandwich.”

  It was as stark an argument as I would face on the fate of the deli, but Neuman’s opinion held a certain validity. Generations of American Jews had fought to shake off the rags of the shtetl, the victimization of the Holocaust, and the prejudices of white America. They had incorporated themselves into the highest levels of society, entertainment, business, and politics. Largely by assimilating so well, Jewish Americans had removed the barriers that had kept them on the margins of the world for over two thousand years. As Mayor Ed Koch told me when we sat in his office cluttered with photographs of him and various world leaders, “Our culture shouldn’t be defined by something that we were fifty years ago. Jews are living in a golden era in the United States.”

  All true, but does it mean that the deli has to be abandoned for the sake of Jewish success in America?

  I don’t think so. In fact, I think the opposite.

  New York City is the most dynamic metropolis on earth because there is no single dominant ethnic group. Each minority has given up certain elements of its native culture, while adopting aspects of others. The most visible manifestation of this is with food. New York is one of the greatest eating cities on earth in a way that is totally different from Paris or Tokyo. It is not the perfection of a single culinary style, but the coming together of innumerable cuisines.

  New York is where they still sell knishes in pushcarts, and where matzo ball soup and pastrami are sold in every single diner, Jewish or otherwise. Only in New York would you have a Chinese restaurant such as Amazing 66, on Mott Street, create dishes such as pastrami fried rice, because the owner, Helen Ng, once ate at the 2nd Ave Deli and loved it. Only in this city would the celebrated French chef Joël Robuchon make his New York debut in the Four Seasons Hotel, and the first dish on the menu would be “Le Pastrami”: a long platter of cold corned beef, poached for five hours with celery, carrot, bay leaf, rosemary, thyme, and spices, then interlaced with chive-kissed Alsatian potato salad, and shaved curls of foie gras.

  If diversity is New York’s strength, assimilation remains New York’s culinary enemy. America’s homogenization waits just off the turnpike. “What’s replacing delis?” asked Ed Levine, head of the New York foodie Web site SeriousEats.com. “It’s Benetton’s and concepts. But deli is not a concept. It is real and it is honest, and people have a hunger for something real.” Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction was an interesting concept, but it closed just two years after opening.

  In the erosion of traditional cultures, the edible is often the last line of defense before total integration. New York’s Jews’ Yiddish language is largely forgotten. Many put Christmas trees in their houses, even though both parents are Jewish. A pastrami sandwich is often the only tangible connection assimilated Jews have to their heritage.

  Which brings me back to Ruth Reichl. “It’s sort of inevitable that our foodways move on,” she said. “More than any other group Jews have assimilated. . . . To become Americans, people tried very hard to eat American food. It was the process of integration. In the 1960s, when you look at what kids brought to lunch, everyone brought peanut butter sandwiches. When you look at kids’ lunches today, the Japanese kids are bringing rice balls wrapped in seaweed, the Korean kids are bringing kimchi, the Mexican kids are bringing tamales. There’s a kind of pride in your own ethnic food, but I think Jews have been here too long to get that.”

  Did she feel it was too late for the Jewish delicatessen in New York?

  “As long as there are two or three places making good pastrami I’ll be happy,” she told me with a comforting smile. “When they disappear, I’ll be miserable.”

  Pastraminomics: The Dollars and Senselessness of the New York Delicatessen Business

  “Look at that!” Harry Rasp said, pointing with indignation as a waiter brought a tray of corned beef, tongue, and pastrami sandwiches to a table. “That’s pure meat going out! What’s the difference between a steak and steak sliced up on a sandwich?”

  The same frustration that had brought Rasp into the deli business as an owner was now driving him out. In 1992, he was eating at a glatt kosher delicatessen with a friend. A big fresser, he and the friend had put away at least seventy dollars’ worth of food during lunch, but on the way out the door Rasp spied a marinated pepper he couldn’t resist. Not so fast, barked the counterman, buy a container or none at all. An argument ensued, and in a self-described “fit of craziness” Rasp decided then and there he was going to open his own deli (where he presumably could eat all the peppers he wanted). Ess
ex On Coney was what Rasp ended up with, a glatt kosher deli on Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue.

  Rasp’s dream had been to replicate the legendary Schmulka Bernstein’s on Essex, a Lower East Side kosher deli/Chinese food restaurant that was the nirvana of his youth. “We waited two hours to get a table,” Rasp recalled. “Bernstein’s on Essex [a.k.a. Schmulka Bernstein’s] was a schmoozefest from all five boroughs.” Essex On Coney’s menu was a near carbon copy of Bernstein’s on Essex, with Sino-Yiddish dishes like Fon Won Gai. Rasp’s meats were head and shoulders above other glatt kosher meats I’d sampled. His hot dogs, secretly made by an individual who worked for a large deli producer, were light pink and incredibly juicy, tasting of caramel without the repercussion of saltiness. Rasp pushed forward a few slices of what looked like corned beef.

  “It’s not corned beef,” he said, arms crossed. “Try it and tell me what you think it is.” I was astounded at the mellow sweetness that built as I chewed. There was a base of corned beef, but the candied flavor was altogether new and deliciously strange. “That’s my honey beef,” Rasp beamed from across the table. “No one else does that.”

  Rasp seemed to have everything: a solid track record, position in a heavily Jewish neighborhood, loyal orthodox clientele, and the food to back it all up. But Rasp couldn’t wait to get out. In fact, he had just sold the business. “I wish I’d known fifteen years ago,” Rasp said, his words laced with bitter regret. “If only I’d taken the money and bought property in New York.”

  As a business, the delicatessen trade was one of the toughest. For Rasp, owning a glatt kosher deli (the only option for an orthodox man) was even worse. At one point there had been over a hundred purveyors who sold glatt kosher meat to delis in New York, but now the number was down to just three. Retaining his glatt certification required Rasp to employ two full-time mashgihim, representatives of the chosen certification board (in this case Vaad Harabonim of Flatbush), who supervise glatt kosher restaurants. A mashgiach‘s services started at fifteen dollars an hour, and in a glatt kosher deli one must always be present. Just for supervision alone, Rasp was putting out close to six grand a month, in addition to the thousands he paid to the certification boards for his license. With rent, labor, insurance, and equipment costs, Essex On Coney needed to sell a hell of a lot of sandwiches to stay afloat. Sadly, hawking pastrami didn’t cut it.