by David Sax
Rose’s way was the old way. Nothing came from a package, though it would have made life easier. It wasn’t about money or the notoriety. Her name wasn’t anywhere in the restaurant, and though she was proud of her legacy, that was never why she toiled away. She did it out of love. A love for the food, a love for her customers, and, I sensed, a love for Tony’s family, immigrants from the same region as her birthplace. “Life is too short, honey, not to be nice. To be nice is easy, to be nasty is hard,” Rose said, grabbing my arm.
“I work my frikkin’ ass off here!” she said, cracking her thick calloused fingers and tossing on her coat. She ran around the kitchen, laying a big kiss on everyone’s forehead, including mine. “Life is like a bowl of cherries, honey. You take the best and sometimes you get the pits!” Her tires squealed as she sped home to make dinner.
Tony began pulling out plates of Rose’s food. First was a bowl of her matzo ball soup, the same one I had seen her making before. Little squares of translucent onion hung in the broth. Her matzo ball rose half out of the bowl, and when I carved off a chunk, I knew why Tony kept Rose around. Dense and packed with schmaltzy flavor, it somehow tasted light, with little pockets of soupy air throughout. I polished off the bowl.
Next came her corned beef knish, stuffed with the hash she’d made in the blender. Shaped like an egg and wrapped in a very flaky crust, it was baked to a George Hamiltonesque hue. I felt guilty for cutting into this beautiful thing, though callous greed was soon rewarded with little flecks of mashed potato and moist corned beef with just a hint of spice. I devoured the knish.
Finally, out came a pair of plump blintzes, one cheese and one strawberry. Both looked fantastic, each seared in butter until they were enveloped in bubbly crusts. First I tackled the cheese blintz, crammed with sweet, creamy farmer’s cheese that was light and delectably warm. After two bites I moved over to its strawberry sister. As my fork pushed down, a surge of red filling burst out of the bulging blintz, and I greedily scraped it off the plate. I alternated between the two blintzes, finally combining both in my mouth for a Wimbledon-worthy strawberry and cream mélange. Sitting there, I thought of the first thing Rose told me when I walked into the kitchen that morning. “I got no recipes for you, okay? When I die a lot is going to the grave with me.”
Rose was right. Her home cooking, like the Stage’s institutional presence, was an anachronism in this land of franchises. It was food that couldn’t be repackaged. To her, making those blintzes was keeping it simple, but her KISS method required a grandmother of six to work up to eight hours daily until her joints were stiff. This wasn’t something that could be passed down easily. When she went, so would her food.
Driving to Ann Arbor, I thought about what I had seen over the previous few days. Here was the American socioeconomic-racial divide stark as ever. The only deli lovers left in the urban decay of Detroit were poor and black, eating their authentic Jewish sandwiches in fortresses. The Jewish delis in wealthy suburbs were under increasing pressure to branch out and modernize, to become nicer and prettier and offer more foods that had nothing to do with deli. To survive, they had to expand, which was inevitably risky and affected the quality of the food. Could these two models—the suburban and urban, with traditional food like Rose Guttman’s and progressive thinking like Steve Goldberg’s—work together and ultimately save Motown’s delis?
Ari Weinzweig was reading his morning coffee when I walked up to the table. On a large paper filter were five different piles of ground Kona beans. Ari picked at each and sniffed, rubbing the grinds beneath his fingertips and rolling them in his palm. He tossed out various comments to one of his managers, banging away on a laptop keyboard so worn the letters had rubbed off. Finally, after twenty minutes of deliberation they agreed that this coffee would be best ground on setting No. 4.
Twenty minutes?
To decide how to grind one type of coffee, out of dozens?
What kind of place was this?
To refer to Zingerman’s as a delicatessen is to refer to Times Square as an intersection. What began as a small deli is today nothing less than one of the most progressive and admired food businesses in the United States. The two minds behind this deli-based revolution are Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw, college buddies who had worked together in local restaurants after graduating from the University of Michigan, here in Ann Arbor. Both Ari (from Chicago) and Paul (from Detroit) had grown up with a taste for deli. In 1982, they decided to open up their own, a venture that Ari’s mother certainly didn’t feel was the best application of his costly Russian History degree.
“What would your parents’ reaction be if you told them you were opening a deli?” Ari said, shaking his head with the mischievous grin that perpetually adorned his bearded face. Tall and thin to the point of gangly, Ari looked younger than his fifty years. It was the dead of winter and he sported a healthy tan, black jeans, and black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. But there was something else to Ari, a kind of Zen that allowed him to walk around in shirtsleeves on a -10 degree day, when the plumper, younger staff were bundled in parkas. This guy was clearly happy in life, and happiness is a key component of the Zingerman’s philosophy. It is right there in the company’s mission statement:
We share the Zingerman’s experience
selling food that makes you happy
giving service that makes you smile
in passionate pursuit of our mission
showing love and care in all our actions
to enrich as many lives as we possibly can
Certainly the boys at Katz’s would cackle at such words, but Zingerman’s lofty slogans and philosophies actually translate into something you can taste. As the deli’s business grew from sandwiches to imported cheese, then olive oils, rare mustards, and gourmet chocolates, Zingerman’s selection became legendary, on par with New York’s Zabar’s. Shelves are stacked with loose-leaf teas; in-house roasted coffees; and thousands of oils, sauces, spices, and spreads from every corner of the earth. Customers can freely taste anything in the store, from a slice of Sy Ginsberg’s corned beef, to a $400 bottle of aged balsamic vinegar, for free, without any need to buy. Tattooed countermen and women with Ph.D.s lecture on the merits of aged Vermont cheddar or prosciutto di Parma. In-store classes on everything from polenta appreciation to the history of hot cocoa educate customers. Ari’s newsletters and e-mails weave traditions and recipes into treatises on eating and ethics. Everything looks gorgeous and tastes incredible.
Avid believers in sustainability, Ari and Paul never wanted their business to be solely about the bottom line. “The classic model is ‘strip mining,’ where you run a business and take as much money out for yourself as possible,” Ari said, noting that for the first few years of Zingerman’s he only took about $200 a week to cover his living expenses. “A sustainable business leaves the community stronger than when it came in.” Today there are eight operations encompassing the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB), with more on the horizon. There is the Roastery, which roasts and sells coffee; the Creamery, which makes dairy products; a catering company; an events company; and a separate restaurant called Zingerman’s Roadhouse, which serves high-end American comfort food. The largest operation is the Bakehouse, which specializes in traditionally made breads and pastries. Baked goods are sold in the deli, at supermarkets in the area, as well as through the Zingerman’s online mail order business.
In addition to the food businesses, Ari and Paul set up Zing Train—a consulting outfit that allows outside clients to learn Zingerman’s business model. Past clients include engineering firms, universities, grocery stores, as well as those wishing to start Zingerman’s—style delis of their own (such as Katzinger’s in Columbus, Ohio). Even traditional Jewish food institutions such as Russ and Daughters, the famous appetizing store on New York’s Lower East Side, have applied the Zingerman’s philosophy of management, training, merchandising, marketing, customer service, and staffing.
At Zingerman’s eve
ryone gets treated like shareholders, from managing partners to part-time fifteen-year-old busboys. Zingerman’s practices open-book finance, keeping staff up to date on current numbers. “Our vision is that everyone who works for us leaves here with a better life,” Ari said. To a hardened deli owner, it may sound like preachy hippie bullshit, but to the kid cutting corned beef at Zingerman’s, it means that his job can lead to a real future. And while most every deli owner I spoke with complained about labor problems, in particular retaining skilled workers in a market dominated by low-wage immigrants, Ari had a surplus of talent. Everywhere I went, his staff were young, educated, motivated, and happy. He had master’s students baking bread and Harvard graduates chopping scallions . . . not because they had to, but because they wanted to work at Zingerman’s. The turnover rate was only 50 per cent, one-quarter the industry norm. “People do a better job when you’re nice to them,” Ari said, “big surprise there.”
Still, there are many critics who claim that Zingerman’s is hardly a Jewish deli; that their mountains of imported hams and truffle oils, training seminars and wedding cakes, have cut them off from their roots. To them I say: Taste! The Jewish food at Zingerman’s is fantastic. As Sy Ginsberg sat down to join us for lunch, we received a plate of the greatest corned beef hash ever. Cubed potatoes, diced onions, and peppers were slowly sauteed together with chunks of Sy’s juiciest corned beef trimmings, mixed with egg, and scrambled into a crisp omelet that was gooey in the middle.
Next came a grilled Reuben. Here was a perfect example of how the ZCoB benefited the whole business. The meat was trimmed in the deli, the coleslaw and Russian dressing were homemade, and the cheese was imported Emmentaler from the grassy pastures of the Swiss Alps. It all came together on the Bakehouse’s own exquisitely complex dark Jewish rye. It was traditionally made with as much rye flour as possible (most rye you’ll eat at delis is made up of regular white flour with a smidgeon of rye flour), then double baked. Touring the Bakehouse later that day, I saw and tasted similar Jewish breads, made with the finest organic ingredients, including whole eggs, homemade butter, and real honey . . . nothing powdered or frozen. There were great dark loaves of sour-smelling pumpernickel and a naturally leavened challah made without packaged yeast (the only one I’ve ever seen). Rose Guttman would have been proud.
But it was Zingerman’s cheese blintz that really drove it home for me: a small square with a dark brown crust on the top. I could taste each ingredient: the velvet milk fat in the Creamery’s own farm cheese, the floral sweetness of the chestnut honey, and the tropical complexity of real Mexican vanilla pods. In that first bite of blintz, I knew why the crowds were lined up outside on this frigid Sunday, waiting an hour to edge into the packed deli just to get a sandwich. I understood why people from all over the nation ordered Zingerman’s breads, why they made pilgrimages to this college town in the middle of Michigan farmland for a corned beef on rye. Ari and Paul had successfully grown a small Jewish delicatessen into a business with over thirty million dollars in annual sales, and in the process managed not just to retain the food’s Jewish tradition, but to deepen it.
Ari didn’t think his and Paul’s model was that difficult or radical, but Sy Ginsberg knew better. Few deli owners had the mixture of creativity, selflessness, and community spirit that Ari and Paul did. Fewer still found themselves in an environment as ideally suited as Ann Arbor: a rich college town with an endless supply of motivated, idealistic labor. It had the best of urban sophistication and suburban comforts, with a small-town insulation that worked to keep competition at bay. In the world beyond the town’s borders, the deli business was more cutthroat, and many who had tried to emulate Zingerman’s elsewhere succeeded only on a surface level.
“The Zingerman clones just don’t match up,” Sy Ginsberg said, wiping bits of blintz from his mustache. “It’s like putting some extra chrome on a Chevy and calling it a Cadillac.”
Chicago: Can Deli Return to the Windy City?
A man walks into Manny’s Coffee Shop & Deli, grabs a tray, and slowly starts down the cafeteria line. On the other side of the counter, a quartet of men in white button-up T-shirts and paper hats reaches underneath the protective glass to retrieve a rainbow of soul-warming dishes. It snowed two feet this week and the Bears got pummeled in the Super Bowl last night. He’s earned this meal.
At the first counterman, he eyes browned strips of baked fish, golden salmon patties, crisp little fried smelts, and knishes big as grapefruits, but he’s drawn to a softball-sized piece of homemade gefilte fish. The counterman hands it over, along with a bowl of mishmosh—chicken soup with the works, including a duo of dense kreplach, a handful of thin noodles, and two matzo balls.
Next, our man arrives at Gino. Manny’s legendary counterman is furiously assembling overstuffed corned beef sandwiches. “Hey pal,” Gino says in a flash, his wry smile emerging behind Einstein whiskers, eyes peering expectantly over spectacles that rest on the tip of his nose. Somewhere in the metronome tempo of two slicing machines peeling off strips of pink corned beef like soft cheese, our man in line falls into a trance, snapping awake only when Gino issues a quick “Hey pal? What can I getcha?”
The man orders a corned beef and Gino explodes into action. He slaps a big slice of rye onto the wood board, flips his fork in the air like a ninja, catches it, and stabs the growing pile of meat falling off the machine’s blade. Gino drops the corned beef onto the bread, tosses another slice on top, and slices the sandwich in half. Then he grabs a plate and pickles, and in one swift move flips the plate into the air, catches it, slams the pickles down, drops on the sandwich, impales a crispy blond latke, and hands it over.
“Fast hands,” our man in line says.
“Yeah,” Gino quips, “and they’re still attached too.”
The man ignores the salad counter and waits while the cashier punches in his friend’s order. Starving now, he takes a fork from the bin and tears off a fat hunk of gefilte fish. It’s so good, almost creamy, that he barely chews, and is still savoring it, when he starts gasping audibly for air. His face turns red. The man is choking.
This is the point when my interview with Ken Raskin, Manny’s owner, is interrupted, as he rushes over to save his customer’s life. Raskin, a great bear of a man, wraps his arms around the choking man and lifts him off his feet, performing the Heimlich maneuver until the offending gefilte fish is dislodged. “Are you okay?” Raskin asks. The man wordlessly pats Raskin on the shoulder in brief thanks, then chews and successfully swallows the very piece of gefilte fish that nearly killed him. Without breaking stride, he joyfully saunters over to his table, where he rips into the rest of his meal with undaunted ferocity. No panic. No tears. No life flashing before his eyes. His only concern is to keep on eating.
“My arms are killing me,” Ken Raskin said, returning to the table rubbing his forearms. I asked Raskin if the man’s unruffled reaction was common. “Four years ago the roof caught on fire at lunchtime and people were fighting to get in!”
The Windy City has all the elements that should make for one of the world’s best delicatessen towns. Its Jewish population clocks in at approximately 285,000, the fourth largest in the country (after Philadelphia), and is one of the few communities that is growing in size. Most of Chicago’s Jews have Ashkenazi roots: Poles, Romanians, Russians, Hungarians . . . delicatessen stock.
Since the rise of the great stockyards in the 1880s, Chicago has long been America’s meatiest city. Up until the 1950s and the advent of refrigerated trucks, if you ate beef in America, Chicago was its likely source. As a result, it was a hub of deli production. Vienna Beef, Best’s Kosher and Sinai 48, Wilno Salami, Shofar Kosher, Eisenberg, Oscherwitz Kosher, King Kold, Sara Lee, and Eli’s Cheesecake are all Chicago Jewish food brands. Chicago’s sausage makers still supply many delis west of the Mississippi.
The factors are all there for a Midwestern deli Mecca: lots of Jews, big carnivores, and a fair chunk of the deli industry. But why weren’t Chicago’s
delis that well known? No one really discussed them. Were they still around? I had seen archival photos of delicatessens in the city from previous decades. Had they simply closed? Were the delis scattered among far-flung suburbs, like those I visited in Detroit? If so, why hadn’t they come back to the city itself, which remained a thriving and wealthy metropolis?
“I don’t think the mentality [in Chicago] was ever that delicatessens were the place to go, like in Cleveland or Detroit or New York,” Bob Schwartz said, recalling his own surprise when he moved to Chicago from Cleveland in the mid-1970s. “It’s a hot dog town primarily.” Schwartz, a short joyous man with a Danny DeVito rasp, was a senior vice president of Vienna Beef. He has published a book on Chicago’s hot dog stands, and drives a red Audi with a license plate that says PSTRAMI. We had just finished a tour of Vienna’s processing plant, a giant industrial facility that annually produces hundreds of millions of pounds of hot dogs and deli meats. Founded in 1894, Vienna Beef is one of the oldest Jewish deli purveyors in the country, predating Hebrew National by a decade, and is largely responsible for popularizing the hot dog in America.
Compared to United Meat and Deli, Vienna was playing in the national leagues. As I toured around with Schwartz, we passed racks of tens of thousands of hot dogs and walked along raised metal catwalks suspended above a dozen vats of bubbling corned beefs. Thousands of briskets and navels awaited entry into giant smokers, stacked onto the racks of metal trolleys suspended from a track in the ceiling. Schwartz said that Vienna sold half a million pounds of corned beef the month before St. Patrick’s Day. With regard to hot dogs, they were making an average of 80,000 pounds a day, upping that to 120,000 pounds during baseball season. The plant runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.