Save the Deli

by David Sax

  “You must be David!” Barbara screamed, pulling me into a big hug. Fred came over and gave my shoulder a squeeze with his huge hands. When they talked it was full of excitement, anticipation, and passionate interruptions of sentences. They waved their hands and forced food upon me. Like Deli Tech itself, Fred and Barbara were over the top in every way. Barbara had the funny habit of keeping her cell phone buried in her cleavage and fished it out repeatedly with her colorful nails. Fred looked like a biker, with a big shaved head and goatee. As big, loud, proud New York Jews, they felt it was part of their duty, as New Yorkers and deli lovers, to educate Denver’s population in the rules of Jewish delicatessen consumption.

  “When we opened I wanted to hire a guy with an NYPD hat and whistle,” Barbara enthusiastically recalled. “When someone ordered corned beef with mayo, he’d blow the whistle and give them a ticket.”

  Bringing New York–style deli to a white bread city was always going to be a challenge. “People out here grew up on chains,” Barbara said in disgust. Fred seized upon his wife’s thought: “If we were to cater to people specifically from Denver you’d never have this stuff here.” With that he brought over a pastrami sandwich stacked so high it toppled over, the glistening fat of Carnegie’s signature meat steamed tender. As they went on about the superiority of Carnegie’s products, I inquired whether they made anything in the delicatessen themselves. Barbara shot back in her seat. “Do we make our own stuff??? Suuuuure we do. It’s the best anywhere.”

  She soon emerged from the kitchen with a wide bowl of blond matzo ball soup. The aroma was intense with lots of celery, and though the matzo ball was coarse, and oddly shaped, it was packed with the flavor of fresh chicken. Beside it floated a kreplach that was delicate as a Cantonese wonton, the paper-thin sheets of dough rolled neatly around soft minced beef. Next she plunked down the mother of all cabbage rolls, a huge steaming, juicy wrap of cabbage leaf packed with rice and ground beef, slathered in a sweet tomato jus. Their turkey, which came sliced from birds roasted on site, was so moist and tender the only word I could jot in my notebook was “perfection.”

  As good as Deli Tech’s imported Carnegie products were, they tasted soulless when compared with the wonderful homemade dishes that Barbara and Fred were churning out. In their quest to be the most New York deli in Denver, they had unwittingly made some of the finest Jewish food in town. “I would love to duplicate this,” Fred said, “I’d love to be able to franchise like Heidi’s did, but I can’t. If you’re gonna put your heart and soul into a deli, how can you open up another restaurant?” He and Barbara were the soul of the place. Deli Tech’s source for kibitz. Its tam (soul).

  I didn’t understand fully what Fred was talking about until I headed to the headquarters of Heidi’s Brooklyn Deli. Started in 1994 by an Italian-American couple from Brooklyn and New Jersey as a bagel bakery, deli, and ice cream store in downtown Denver, by 2007 Heidi’s had grown into a national chain of sandwich shops. There were more than thirty franchised stores, with locations all over Colorado and a dozen other states. Six times that many franchises were slated to open in the following years. Considering its franchising only began in 2005, Heidi’s was spreading like wildfire.

  Steve and Heidi Naples were constantly turning down people eager to pay $35,000 for franchise rights, plus $300,000 to $400,000 to build a store. Investors had to commit to opening three outlets, but successful stores could pull in upwards of $1.3 million annually. It was big business, a corporate American chain delicatessen, and people apparently wanted it bad. When Fred Anzman and Barbara Simon complained how people in Denver equated deli with a sandwich shop, this was what they were talking about. “A real Jewish deli cannot be duplicated,” Steve Naples told me. “The reality is, if you don’t systematize it, you’re on edge all the time. You may make money, but your kids won’t want it. For all the nostalgia of what we remember, the New York deli reality was fights, divorces, and eighty-hour weeks where people never saw their kids.”

  Naples took me into one of the newest Heidi’s locations to show me what he meant by “systematizing.” In the spotless kitchen, manuals outlined how to bake the large square loaves of airy bread, slice meat, and make sandwiches. Every single function was laid out, from how thick the tomatoes were to be sliced, to the best way to microwave the pastrami. Yes . . . microwave.

  “Look,” Steve said defensively at my look of revulsion upon hearing the M word, “we tried to steam it and grill it but we can’t. The reality is that you have to sacrifice a bit of flavor when you take your product to the mass market.” The further Heidi’s spread across the country, the more mechanical it became. At Heidi’s, the goal was for their Bronx Bomber sandwich (pastrami and egg salad on rye) to taste the same in Colorado Springs as it did in D.C. You couldn’t teach each new franchisee how to properly steam navel pastrami. It took months, if not years, of experience. So you made the pastrami out of the top round cut, which is drier and has less flavor, but cutting it is like slicing cheese.

  As I was driving northwest toward the hills of Boulder, it struck me that the answer to my question of local delis vs. New York-modeled delis wasn’t so clear. Denver delis like the Bagel and Zaidy’s were purely local, but their individual success hadn’t spawned any surge in Denver’s deli eating, and they didn’t really have any distinctly Denver characteristics, no local equivalent of that hickory-smoked brisket. New York Deli News, Deli Tech, and even Heidi’s were all connected to the New York deli experience in some way, but they were definitely Colorado operations, and in the case of Deli Tech, their locally made food was even better than what they brought in from 1,700 miles away on freezer trucks. My worry was that Heidi’s microwaved pastrami would teach local mouths what a delicatessen should be, leaving little hope for a haymish Jewish deli to survive in the thin air.

  Jimmy and Drew’s 28th Street Deli, Boulder, Colorado

  While in Denver, I’d heard rumors that a new deli had just opened in Boulder, and supposedly it was making everything from scratch. This place had the improbably long name of Jimmy and Drew’s 28th Street Deli, which to me reeked of wannabe New Yorkism and, well, goyishness. My spirits picked up a bit as I read the notices for Torah study classes and other Jewish community flyers tacked up by the deli’s door alongside fly fishing photos and ads for used Subarus. “Hey man, you must be David,” Jarrett “Jimmy” Eggers said, coming toward me with latex gloves on. Tall, slender, and dressed in a fly fishing hat and fly fishing sweater, he hardly cut the traditional image of the Jewish deli owner (hint: fly fishing), but this was Boulder and I was hungry. “C’mon back to the smokehouse,” he said, “I’ve got some salmon that’s just about ready to come out.”

  Salmon smoking in-house? Seriously?

  Eggers pulled out gorgeous-looking salmon sides from the smoker. Each was colored a luscious mandarin orange and glistened with the fatty remnants of the sugar and salt cure that had permeated the fish over three days. “We try to smoke them fresh the night before, so people get the best lox at breakfast.”

  I was blown away. Though I’d seen delicatessens cure their own corned beef (which Jimmy and Drew’s also did), and the rare one smoke its own pastrami (ditto here too), I’d never seen anyone smoke their own salmon. In fact, Jimmy and Drew’s smoked two kinds of salmon . . . the cold smoked lox, and the hot smoked kippered salmon. Talking with Eggers, he rattled off the dishes they made from scratch in the store: latkes, chopped liver, noodle and onion kugels, several types of knishes, gefilte fish, herring in cream, stuffed cabbage polonaise (cooked slowly for twelve hours, like the braised corned beef), and of course matzo ball soup. Jimmy walked me over to the sandwich assembly area and ran a spreading knife through a metal vat.

  “This is schmaltz,” he said, letting me lick the knife. “We make this from the fat skimmed off the chicken soup, which is basically forty chickens boiled in a pot.” Homemade schmaltz! I couldn’t believe what I was tasting. Here I was in the mountains of Colorado, at a brand spanking new deli,
and a tall blond fly fisherman was offering me a taste of the substance at the very core of Yiddish cooking. Imagine the creamiest, richest butter you’ve ever had imported from France, then multiply it by two and impart the mellow aftertaste of crackling chicken skin . . . that’s what fresh schmaltz tastes like.

  Eggers had grown up in Fort Collins, Colorado, but moved to suburban Chicago for high school, where he became best friends with Andrew “Drew” Marx. Every day after school the duo would end up back at the Marx house, where they’d raid the fridge filled with Drew’s mother’s Jewish cooking. Marx went on to graduate from the Culinary Institute of America and worked as a chef at high-end restaurants, but he and Eggers held on to a dream of opening a deli together. Finally, in May 2006, both living in Boulder, they opened their restaurant on 28th Street (hence the name). The meat was not processed, and most dishes were made from scratch. Cakes and pastries were even baked by Drew’s mom, Sarah Marx, who had moved out to Colorado as well. Two blocks away from the nation’s busiest Whole Foods store, an essentially sustainable, healthy, locally focused deli was being born. “Drew’s philosophy has always been that if you do things simply with real fresh ingredients, the flavors are so much better,” Eggers said.

  Ahh the flavors. Even months later, as I’m sitting here, they stick out in my mind. There was the breakfast knish, a buttery little oval pastry packed with steaming corned beef hash, a thin layer of melted cheddar, and fluffy scrambled eggs. There were insanely large combination sandwiches: Jimmy’s Favorite (which was a towering Reuben between two thin, crisp latkes), and Spudnik (hot corned beef and pastrami topped with coleslaw, melted Swiss, Russian dressing, and fresh-cut french fries). But it was a square of sweet noodle kugel that won my heart that afternoon. Dusted with cinnamon, it was as though the custardy starchiness of a rice pudding had been coaxed out of the noodles. “Oh my god,” I said to Eggers, coming up for air before diving in for another forkful, “that is fucking brilliant!”

  Since I’d left Chicago I’d had some good deli, but Jimmy and Drew’s blew me away, largely because it was so unexpected. In that bite of kugel, I realized great Jewish delicatessens could happen anywhere. People, philosophy, and ingredients mattered so much more than place. Though Eggers figured they needed another year or two to feel completely stable, I knew they were going to succeed. And they were going to do it without selling out the food, trading on the image of other cities, or cutting corners by outsourcing products. Once upon a time all Jewish delicatessens had operated like this. I can say that I tasted more hope that night in Boulder than in any other delicatessen I had encountered on my journey so far.

  Kosher on the Go, Salt Lake City, Utah

  In the red states of North America, where the Jewish population of the state is lower than the number of Jews who pass through Zabar’s weekly, the presence of Jewish food isn’t a luxury, but a necessity. Spread between the Mormon capital, Salt Lake City, and the posh ski resort Park City, Utah’s Jewish community numbers roughly four thousand souls. In this unlikely place sat Kosher on the Go, a tiny glatt kosher delicatessen run out of Israel and Miriam Lefler’s living room.

  An Israeli aircraft technician who moved to Utah in 1985 to calibrate U.S. Air Force fighter jets, the bearded, Hasidic Lefler still developed satellite communications for the CIA and FBI. He’d opened Kosher on the Go with his wife, Miriam (a diminutive Jew from the Philippines), in 2001, setting aside the front room of their small bungalow to prepare the only kosher meals in the state. With just two hundred Jewish families in Salt Lake City, most of whom were unaffiliated, 95 per cent of Kosher on the Go’s business came from Jewish tourists or catering. In addition, Mormons will often order Jewish foods for the Jewish holy days. “They like Jewish food,” Israel said of the Mormons. “Don’t get me wrong, they’ll still try to convert you, but once they realize not, you’re okay.”

  The place certainly had a frontier feel to it. Most of the meat was pre-sliced, portioned, and frozen, as was the bread. Everything had to be imported from around the country, making it a costly and therefore very basic operation. Kosher on the Go’s corned beef sandwich (at a quarter-pound) cost eleven dollars. Israel worked two jobs just to support his family and keep the place in business, but with far-flung delis like Kosher on the Go, the greater purpose was far grander than business. They were deli missionaries. “For us, it’s not about the money,” he said, twisting the ends of his beard between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s a mitzvah. When someone comes to town, he doesn’t have to eat sardines for the week.”

  I Left My Kishkes in San Francisco

  Until very recently, San Francisco was a dying deli town. Only a handful of the several dozen delicatessens found in the city around the 1950s remain. The peak of the decline came in 2000, when the beloved Shenson’s Deli closed after sixty-seven years in business, despite one of the last owners’ attempts to give away the struggling deli in a poetry contest. It was a shame, because San Francisco is perfectly positioned to reinvent deli for today’s palate. The city boasts one of the oldest and most established Jewish communities in the country. San Francisco has more in common with the tightly packed urban jungle of New York than it does with the sprawl of Sacramento. Most importantly, San Francisco wholeheartedly stands in the vanguard of culinary America. The heart of the modern organic movement is still beating at Alice Waters’s iconic restaurant Chez Panisse. With its armada of small boutiques, restaurants, and the spectacular Ferry Building Marketplace, San Francisco is a city that foodies dream about.

  Until recently, the delicatessens in San Francisco seemed on the opposite side of the city’s culinary evolution. Rather than pushing boundaries, they were letting traditions decline. Brother’s Manhattan Deli, a once venerable institution, was now owned by Vietnamese immigrants, who added such items to the “kosher-style” menu as pho (soup) with BBQ pork. No one had anything good to say about the deli scene in the Bay Area for years, until a tenuous new generation of Jewish delicatessens began emerging, approaching deli with a loca-vore’s take on the food. “Our growth came from our perspective that the reason deli did not taste so yummy anymore was that ingredients and their sourcing were ignored,” Peter Levitt, the co-owner of Saul’s Deli, in Berkeley, wrote me in an e-mail, explaining the sustainable philosophy that had brought Saul’s back to life in 1999. “We have also been part of the local sourcing movement. Pastrami, rye, pickles, and bagels from NY are no longer cool or practical.” Levitt, previously a cook at Chez Panisse, serves sandwiches with the Niman Ranch’s naturally cured pastrami on old world rye from the famous Acme Bakery.

  The Bay Area’s gourmet deli renaissance even gave birth to high-end delicatessen meats. In 1997, foodie radio personalities Rachel and David Michael Cane were so dissatisfied with the state of overly processed pastrami that they launched their own brand. Conjured up through backyard experiments, David’s Old World Brand Pastrami comes from USDA Choice 1st cut beef, contains no artificial coloring, is dry cured in barrels for two weeks, and is then smoked over real hickory.

  “It’s a different product,” said David, as he fed slices of the rosy meat into a small steamer set up inside his recording studio. “It doesn’t assault you, it has a much lighter feel.” The subtle mélange of spicing—a heady mix of black pepper, caramelized sugar, and what tasted like salty sea breezes—demonstrated just a whiff of the Bay Area’s gourmet deli potential: a product crafted by highly motivated, educated, and dedicated foodies, who strove to recapture the best of Jewish food traditions without compromise. They did this not through any new techniques imported from French chefs, but by eliminating industrial processes. “If deli customers only knew the ingredients they were eating in processed pastrami,” Rachel said, “they’d be mortified.” David and Rachel’s had even made a limited batch of Wagyu pastrami, with briskets from the intensely marbled breed of cattle used to make Kobe beef. It sold for a whopping $47.98 a pound. Rachel described it as a meat so rich and fatty it was almost creamy and was best served in thi
n slices, because a full sandwich could stop the heart of a shark.

  The delicatessen resurgence in San Francisco penetrated to the core of the city’s Jewish community. In 2006, the SF-New York Deli, a glatt kosher delicatessen, entered the scene in downtown San Francisco. The brains behind the operation were four young men from Brooklyn and Miami, ranging from just nineteen to twenty-three years old, all fresh out of yeshiva. Two of them were ordained orthodox rabbis and one could even perform his own kosher certification in the store (which certainly cut down on costs). The same year saw the rise of the California Street Delicatessen, a bright nouveau-deli that opened in the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. It featured a menu created by notable chef Joyce Goldstein and had attractive servers and a minimalist look. The California Street Deli also shared a kitchen with a sushi restaurant, an attempt by owners to satisfy both the pastrami-craving bubbes in tracksuits and sashimi-loving granddaughters in yoga pants.

  Still, San Francisco’s delicatessen renaissance was far from solid. Even with its prime spot in a Jewish community center, the California Street Delicatessen closed in June 2007. The SF-New York Deli folded a year later. Though Saul’s remains in business, it was apparent that the Bay Area’s deli revival would take more than bold ideas. It needed Deli Men willing to stick it out.

  “This is pathetic. How is it that the city with the best food in America, the city that can cook anything, can’t have a decent sandwich?”