by David Sax
Yet in Melman, both Rubin, Schlan, and other ambitious Chicago deli owners saw their dreams lived to their fullest, and they couldn’t help but try to emulate his success. Many had tried over the years. Max and Benny’s foray downtown demonstrated just how difficult that was. Eleven City Diner was a success, but one that seemed inseparable from its charismatic owner. What would happen when Rubin opened his second location, splitting his presence between two relatively new restaurants?
Chicago’s deli revival was building up steam. Long-standing local delis such as Max’s and Eppy’s were adding more locations, and the popular Michigan deli Steve’s had just opened in downtown Chicago. I openly confessed to Rubin that I feared he was spreading himself too thin. He worked ridiculous hours and in 2008 had to undergo three back surgeries from the damage he’d done to his spine at the restaurant. Eleven City Diner was a major part of that revival, but it needed to be nurtured and settle roots before branching out further. Aggressive expansion was tempting in the short run, but it increased the risk that Chicago’s deli revival could fizzle. Rubin admitted he had those concerns too, but he was intent on sticking around as long as Manny’s had. “I have one shot at making this succeed,” he said, “and I don’t want to fail.”
Manny’s was the biggest, best-known, and oldest deli in the city, and it was directly tied into Chicago’s nascent Jewish deli revival. As owner Ken Raskin told the story, his grandfather Jack Raskin bought a cafeteria called Sonny’s in 1945, and because it was cheaper to change two letters on the sign, he named it after his son Emanuel, ergo Manny’s. From age thirteen on, Ken Raskin worked at Manny’s every Saturday and summer with his dad. After the 1968 riots, Manny’s closed at nights and on weekends, though the riot police took their lunch breaks at Manny’s between cracking skulls at the Democratic National Convention. When Ken was just twenty-seven years old, his father suddenly died of a heart attack. It was a terrible shock. Ken’s wife, Patti, had recently given birth to a second son, Danny, and the young family now lived in the suburb of Deerfield, thirty-five miles from the deli. Still, Ken Raskin never considered closing.
“I had been working here for half my life,” Ken recalled. “I had a mortgage and two kids, but I also had a point to prove, because all the old-timers on the street were taking bets on how long I could last.” Raskin worked tirelessly to maintain the original look, feel, and taste of Manny’s. The potatoes were still peeled by hand and the latkes fried in cast-iron skillets. The antique water fountain, with a framed photo of Manny Raskin hanging above it, still anchored the deli.
In 2006, Ken’s son Danny, then twenty-four, began working full time at Manny’s, the fourth Raskin in an unbroken line of succession. Since coming on board he had pushed Ken for small modernizations. It was at Danny’s insistence that Manny’s took credit cards. He’d lobbied his dad hard to reopen Sundays and at nights for dinner and brought in free valet parking for customers, a move that drove up business during winter. The most important change had been to the food. Though Danny introduced chopped salads and a few “healthier” items, he’d also brought back traditional Jewish foods.
“I’ve noticed people my age started eating that food again, like noodle kugel,” Danny said. “We were always afraid that when our older clientele died off, that food would too. The thing that makes you smile is that on Saturdays we’re busier now than on any other day of the week. People my age come in with strollers and load up their trays with matzo ball soup and other Jewish foods. We are trying to modernize without changing the core of what we are. I don’t want to stop those small things that make us Manny’s, I just want to make it more efficient.”
A new generation was on the cusp of rediscovering their past through the deli, and Manny’s, the oldest and grandest of Chicago’s delis, led the way. It wasn’t the interior design that lured them; Manny’s had no plasma televisions or plush banquettes. They came for what delis do best: kugel, kishke, gefilte fish, and fat sandwiches of tender, hot, pink corned beef. Danny Raskin’s generation would save the Windy City’s deli.
When Danny got up to help a young mother with a baby carry a tray to her table, Ken leaned in close: “He could have been an executive. It’s a major regret of mine. But this has been a major part of the fun of working here. When I’m not here, Danny shines.”
Danny returned and asked what we were talking about. Ken just smiled, put his arm around the boy’s shoulder, and pulled him close.
The Yucchuputzville Diaries Part 1: Goy West Young Man
(St. Louis—Kansas City—Denver—Boulder—Salt Lake City)
I left Chicago with just under two weeks to drive to California, well over half the width of the continental United States. To most deli lovers on the coasts, nothing exists in Middle America except cornfields, football, and ham on white. In 2006, barely 4,000 Jews lived in Utah, only 430 in Wyoming. But Missouri and Colorado both had substantial Jewish communities, and I knew that if there were Jews out there, then by god there had to be some deli to feed them. Armed with a list of local contacts in each city, and the willingness to Google “Jewish Deli” and a state’s name in endless combinations, I was ready to seek deli in some of the reddest states in the Union.
Protzel’s Delicatessen, Clayton, Missouri
Above a single-story red brick storefront on a leafy side street, a faded sign announced in hand-painted letters, “Bob and Evelyn PROTZEL’S” with a nice blue Star of David to the right. Below, the words FINE FOODS were sandwiched between CORNED BEEF and PASTRAMI. It could have been the most perfect deli sign I’d ever seen. In one glance you knew the proprietors, that they were Jewish, and that you could find fine foods here, such as corned beef and pastrami.
Protzel’s was a narrow takeout-only deli with a long counter running down its length. Above the deli counter, the Protzel family history was in full view. Photographs of Bob Protzel, the original owner, elbowed up against bar mitzvah pictures of his grandchildren Max and Erica, both of whom now worked behind the counter. There were also humorous slogans written by Bob, a former freelance copywriter:
CHOPPED LIVER
$17, 980.00 per Ton
May be Purchased in Smaller Quantities
Bob Protzel had grown up poor in St. Louis and managed to open Protzel’s Delicatessen in 1954 with his wife, Evelyn. During that period there were over a dozen Jewish delis in greater St. Louis, a city that held a significant Jewish presence because of its role as a trade center on the Mississippi, including places like Louis’, Platt’s, Sherman’s, Fishman’s, Solomon Deli, Eli’s, and El and Lee, which fed a largely urban community. But as downtown St. Louis suffered white flight, and the Jews spread out amid the suburbs, all the other delis closed. Though the Jews of greater St. Louis were now a smaller percentage of the overall population than they had once been, they remained a close-knit community, and on this Sunday the lunch lineup was snaking out the door. Most came for Protzel’s specialty: corned beef derived from a secret recipe.
“My father knew nothing about the business,” said his son, Alan Protzel. “Six months after he opened the store, a man came in called Braverman. He told my father, ‘I’ll give you the best recipe for corned beef under certain conditions.’ My father wasn’t allowed to sell the recipe and he had to pass it on to another young man if he ever sold the business. And that was that.” The homemade corned beef also turned out to be the key to Protzel’s survival. When supermarkets opened their deli sections in the 1960s, the other Jewish delis, who sold precooked corned beef that they purchased from Chicago, couldn’t compete. But people were willing to pay a premium for Protzel’s homemade product. Protzel’s now sells over six hundred pounds of it a week, all barrel cured and cooked in the back of the cramped store. It is always served cold.
As I pigged out on slices of meats from a plastic plate—including the dynamite corned beef, moist even when cold, and a few slices of lovely tongue, which had a mild roast garlic aftertaste—I asked father and son about the importance of their family’s leg
acy. “To tell you the truth,” Alan said, “I would have closed the deli if Max didn’t take it. Either that or sold it. And Max could care less about the legacy of the place. Look, nothing is forever, this place will either get sold or franchised.”
I was shocked at how fatalistic it all seemed. Max, who was in his mid-twenties and recently married, didn’t like the hours. “If I could do it without Sundays I’d be happier, but you just can’t.” Alan was even more direct. For decades he’d sacrificed advances in his career as an insurance executive in order to keep his late father’s deli thriving. He made it clear that he was ready to cash out. “You put the right amount of money on the table for our corned beef recipe and I’ll go out.”
I couldn’t believe it. He was talking about selling the very corned beef recipe that had taken the family out of poverty, paid Alan’s way through college, and allowed Protzel’s to outlast every other Jewish deli in St. Louis. The same secret corned beef recipe that was passed along on the explicit promise that it never be sold.
“Hey,” said Alan Protzel, “that’s my dad’s promise, not mine.”
New York Bakery and Delicatessen, Kansas City, Missouri
I didn’t have high hopes for Kansas City. The city’s Jewish population is fairly small, just shy of eight thousand, and it’s a place made famous for the ultimate treyf cuisine, BBQ ribs. But when I saw the New York Bakery and Delicatessen, I immediately knew my preconceptions were way off. As I walked in the door, the sweet smell of baking lebkuchen cookies, danish, bagels, and breads assaulted me from all sides. There was an arranged chaos that only added to the feeling of a well-established institution: the sparse racks of matzos, portraits of previous owners, license plates that said bagel, bagels, and nydeli, and old Star of David cookie cutters hanging on the walls.
The New York Bakery and Delicatessen happened to be one of the oldest delicatessens in the country, originally opened in 1905 by Esther and Isadore Becker, who’d come to Kansas City from Poland. When I arrived it was in the hands of Jim Holzmark, a sweet, laid-back gentleman with a crown of white hair around his bald skull and a lazy drawl. Holzmark, who’d grown up in the food business in Kansas City, had bought the delicatessen in 1981. With the other Kansas City delicatessens (Milwaukee Deli, Main St. Deli, and Schenkman’s) having closed, Holzmark found himself at the helm of KC’s only remaining Jewish deli and its oldest restaurant.
“We’re a Jewish delicatessen, not a sandwich shop,” Holzmark corrected me, when I referred to his establishment as a deli. “We’re the real deal or as close as you’re going to get in Kansas City.” In the 1940s, the neighborhood had been the core of Kansas City’s Jewish community, but time and economics had left it mostly in the hands of black families. When he first purchased the store, Holzmark estimated that up to 90 per cent of the delicatessen’s clientele came from the Jewish community, and that a mere 5 per cent were black. Today, those numbers have almost completely reversed, with Jews accounting for a tiny 15 per cent of business and blacks for an overwhelming 60 per cent (the rest made up by whites). Holzmark couldn’t have been happier with the arrangement.
“Blacks don’t have problems with eating cholesterol,” Holzmark said, as one of his regular clients ordered a towering Reuben sandwich at eleven in the morning. “If you’ve grown up eating barbecue, pastrami is a drop in the bucket. They’ll come up to the counter and say ‘Man, lay that fat on my corned beef sandwich!’”
This type of cross-cultural adulation, between African-American appetites and Jewish cooking, was one I saw many times—at Katz’s in New York, Lou’s in Detroit, or Manny’s in Chicago—but the New York Bakery and Delicatessen had managed to take it one step further through its fantastic hickory-smoked brisket. Devised by the delicatessen’s head cook, Sonny Taborn, this smoked brisket was the best combination of Jewish and black cuisines I’d yet seen. Sonny rubbed raw briskets with a mix of secret seasoning (the only hint I got was that it contained Lawry’s salt), and then smoked them in a custom-built metal box with a puck of pure hickory for five to six hours.
“I jus’ put a little touch to it,” Sonny said, pulling aside a small vent pipe from the smoker to reveal a trickle of light smoke puffing up, “you know what I’m sayin’?”
It was mild, crumbly, and definitely smoky, a subdued and wonderful contrast to the powerful kick of a pastrami with far more wood flavor in each bite. Paired with a spicy brown mustard, it went down wonderfully.
“A true example of Black/Jewish fusion,” I said to Holzmark.
“Mmmm hmmm,” he hummed in approval, “KC cookin’.”
In recent months, Holzmark was planning a return to the delicatessen’s traditions. He proudly displayed a bag of chicken livers that he was getting ready to make into his first batch of chopped liver in a dozen years. But as we talked, Holzmark also confessed that he had put the delicatessen up for sale just a week before. His children, whom he had hoped to pass the business on to, wanted no part of the deli, and Holzmark was tired of working twelve-hour days, 365 days a year, when a timeshare in Mexico lay waiting.
“When you’re in this type of business, you’re in servitude,” Holzmark said. “I’d hate to close her down, but as long as I get my money I’m happy.” For the second day in a row, I’d been told by a Midwestern deli owner that it was time to flee the ship. History clearly showed that the survival chances of Protzel’s or the New York Bakery and Delicatessen diminished once they left family hands. I promised to check back in a few months’ time. As of early 2009, the deli hadn’t sold. Despite a few offers, none had closed. “Cash talks, but bullshit walks,” Holzmark said, optimistically adding, “I guess I’ll stay here for a while.” A glimmer of hope for Kansas City, however faint.
Mile High Rye, Denver, Colorado
Although I visited several of Denver’s native delicatessens, including the stellar Zaidy’s, the cozy Bagel, and the large, glatt-kosher East Side Kosher Deli, it was the so-called New York delis that really caught my eye in the Mile High City. For every five New Yorkers who leave for greener pastures, there will inevitably be one who decides that the new hometown needs a real New York deli, and he or she, a real New Yorker, is just the person to open it. This tradition dates back to the turn of the twentieth century, when Jewish immigrants would disembark in New York before setting off elsewhere in America. Many of them would open delicatessens named after New York, often as a telltale sign that they were offering authentic kosher food.
To many, a Jewish delicatessen and a New York delicatessen are one and the same. As one Texas deli owner told me, “We use New York so we don’t have to say Jewish. Though out here, New York means Jew.” Across America there are dozens of delis with names like New York Deli, the New Yorker Deli, Manhattan Deli, Bronx Deli, etc. . . . Often, they are the first to enter a market where delicatessens never existed. The Eat This Deli was opened in 2005 in Rogers, Arkansas, by Dr. Ron Haberman, a cardiologist from Queens, and was located just miles from Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters. Unfortunately, Eat This Deli lasted only a year before closing. The Arkansas Democrat Gazette joyfully surmised that “it may have carried too much of a Yankee boast.”
This is often the problem with exported New York delicatessens. They strive to be overly New York in every sense of the word, overwhelming locals with attitude. Each is decorated like a compressed version of Times Square. The owners of these delis are usually trying to impress one small subset of the local population—other native New Yorkers, who are ready within their first bite of a knish to accept the place as their deliverance or cast them down as charlatans. But for all their tacky bravado, these exports raise an interesting question. Does the salvation of the American Jewish delicatessen lie in maintaining a strong connection with its origins in New York or will a local approach ultimately win more hearts and mouths?
In Denver there were two delis competing for the title of most New York, with a third that leveraged its Brooklyn name to tremendous financial success. The New York Deli News had been arou
nd the longest, operating since 1989 in East Denver. Its owner, Al Belsky, came from Manhattan, where his parents owned the Fashion Luncheonette, a delicatessen in the garment district. When Belsky’s parents retired, Al took over with his wife, Victoria, but soon moved to Denver, where they’d attended college, and opened New York Deli News, replicating the menu of the Fashion Luncheonette.
A sign outside the New York Deli News announced: “Leaving Denver, Entering New York.” Their claim to fame was how much of their product arrived from New York. Meats and ryes came from outside Manhattan, the bagels from H & H, and the smoked fish from Brooklyn’s Acme. Initially more than half Belsky’s clients were Jewish ex-New Yorkers who craved a nostalgic nosh, though Catholic priests and Hall of Fame Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway also ranked as devotees. Clearly the New York attitude wasn’t that hard-core, because they let Mr. Elway order his pastrami sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise, without so much as a sneeze.
When Belsky first opened, his partner at the time was Fred Anzman, an accountant from Long Island. Fred left the partnership after a few months, but reemerged on the Denver deli scene in 2002, when he opened Deli Tech with his wife, Barbara Simon. Whenever they went back to New York, Fred and Barbara invariably ate most of their meals at the Carnegie Delicatessen. One visit, Fred asked owner Sandy Levine whether he could open a Carnegie Delicatessen out in Colorado. Levine said franchises weren’t an option, but he was happy to sell Fred and Barbara the Carnegie Delicatessen’s product from his New Jersey commissary. Eventually they would import eight to ten thousand dollars a month of frozen Carnegie meats and cheesecakes, in addition to other New York deli staples. Fred and Barbara went ahead designing a delicatessen that would be more New York than the Yankees. Deli Tech (so named because it is located in the Denver Tech Center) was packed with enough New York kitsch to feel like a Broadway gift shop.