Save the Deli

by David Sax

  But Vegas was a different story, and part of the Carnegie’s new strategy. “I will open other delis,” Levine told me in New York, “but only in tourist areas, never competing with local delis.” Selling to locals required a level of service and pricing that was difficult to replicate. You could charge tourists more, make more, and put yourself in a high-rent area that catered to those willing to eat massive sandwiches for the photo-op alone. Levine insisted that if a deli had the Carnegie name on the sign, it had to be owned and operated by him. Among other conditions were the following: the deli had to have table service; it could not be a kiosk or a self-service counter; and it had to exclusively use Carnegie products, from the meat to the mustard. The Carnegie’s commissary in New Jersey produced all the cheesecakes, breads, and pastrami that supplied the Manhattan delicatessen, Las Vegas, and wholesale customers like Deli Tech in Denver. Carnegie had recently begun producing vacuum-packed, pre-sliced pastrami for Costco outlets around the United States. Just pop into boiling water and voilà. . . hot pastrami.

  The Carnegie Delicatessen inside the Mirage occupied a sort of open triangle in the middle of the casino floor. It was surrounded by hundreds of bleeping slots and a gigantic sport betting area. At the entrance was a low wall with the logo of the Carnegie Delicatessen—a big red heart with an arrow through it. Along the back, salamis hung along a deli counter. The servers, all dressed in bowties, shirtsleeves, and black aprons, were friendly and served with just the right touch of attitude. Even late in the evening, the place was pretty much packed. Best of all, it smelled like a deli, which is no small feat in a building where the air is continuously pumped with oxygen to keep gamblers awake.

  Next to me, a large geeky couple in matching Halo T-shirts were struggling to finish a Woody Allen pastrami/corned beef sandwich. It had toppled over in a meaty avalanche, and though the wife appeared to be falling into a diabetic coma, the pair kept shoveling forkfuls of salty meat into their mouths. I ordered a latke and a small plate of pastrami, which the waitress was kind enough to give me for no extra charge. The meat was excellent, and though it was closer to warm than hot, the Carnegie’s trademark spicing shone through. There was an initial sweetness, followed by a building peppery barrage, carried along the way with an overtone of liquefied salt and the cool hints of coriander lurking devilishly in the background.

  The latke came out soon after the pastrami, the oil from the fryer still bubbling on the brown ridges of its wavy surface. I tore a scraggly chunk off the end, dipped it in applesauce, and danced the scalding treat around my tongue. It was excellent: airy inside, really crisp on the outside, and blessed with just enough sizzling fat to make it decadent, but not greasy. I polished off the latke and meat just in time to hear the couple pay and the husband say, “I wanna get drunk like a Klingon.” I hit the nearest blackjack table and in half an hour won back my previous losses, plus the combined total of my deli grazing. Satisfied, I walked across the street to Treasure Island to hit up Canter’s, but it had closed at midnight, as had Zoozacrackers, the delicatessen/coffee shop in the Wynn hotel. I couldn’t believe they all shuttered so early, considering that Canter’s in L.A. was open twenty-four hours. By the time I got back to my hotel, my head was pounding from the drinks, lights, and noise. I walked up to an empty blackjack table, put down my remaining cash, and doubled it in four hands.

  10:30 A.M.: Canter’s Delicatessen, Treasure Island Hotel and Casino

  Given what Gary Canter had said in Los Angeles, my hopes for Canter’s were high. Designed like the set of a futuristic spaceship, complete with swiveling captain’s armchairs, I can only describe the architecture as late George Lucas. There was no deli counter or slicing machine visible. The menu consisted mainly of sandwiches. Only a few of the baked goods from Canter’s incredible bakery rested in a small case. Each was individually wrapped, and didn’t really look like any I’d eaten in L.A. Because the deli meats weren’t going to be ready for another few hours I opted for a bagel and cream cheese. What I got was a plastic plate, a plastic knife, two little packages of Philadelphia cream cheese, and a plain bagel. There was no tomato or onion or cucumber, and apparently they were out of lox. I looked down at this sad bagel, which I wasn’t even sure came from Canter’s (it tasted like a supermarket bagel), and sighed. I could have had this exact meal on an airplane.

  If the Vegas model is to be the next frontier of delicatessens, as those like Gary Canter and others predicted, we have a disappointing future. Though deli owners saw easy fortunes to be made, none acknowledged the sacrifice required to do so. No matter how good the plan was, or the infinite piles of money they put into it, a delicatessen branch in a Las Vegas casino would never equal the original. The best of the lot was Carnegie, and even that was a shadow of the 7th Avenue location.

  There would always be something lacking because casino owners wanted predictability above all else. Deli owners wanted the money, but they didn’t want to live in Las Vegas. The customers would always be new, changing, and transient. The Las Vegas Strip wasn’t a community. For that, residents went to Weiss Bakery and Deli, for food that was head and shoulders above the corporate delicatessens in the casinos. If I had to choose the future of the Jewish delicatessen based on what I saw in Vegas, I would bet on the home cooking of Michael Weiss any day. As for the corporate franchises and licensed operations, I just hope that what happened in Vegas remains in Vegas.

  The Yucchuputzville Diaries Part 2: Schmaltz by Southwest

  (Scottsdale—Austin—Houston—New Orleans—Atlanta——Washington)

  From Las Vegas I had just over two weeks to drive to Florida, do my research, and hightail it back to Toronto for the first night of Passover. Once again I was leaving the urban, historically Jewish coasts and venturing into the goyish heartland: the southwestern desert, the Gulf Coast, the Deep South, and even the nation’s capital. By now my skepticism, though apparent, had eased somewhat. I wasn’t sure which delis I’d find here, or what they’d be like, but I knew that no look at America’s delicatessen landscape would be complete without a journey through its warm underbelly.

  Goldman’s Deli, Scottsdale, Arizona

  It was pushing eighty-five degrees outside Goldman’s Deli, and noon was still an hour away. Inside, a crowd largely made up of retirees in their mid-sixties slurped up hot borscht. The tanned flesh of their faces crinkled in anger as they watched Fox News, loudly commentating on the grave injustices of the day.

  “God damn Mexicans,” one man told his golf buddy, to scenes of immigrants being chased through the desert, “they get what they deserve.”

  At the counter, Sam Goldman, a squat young man in a baseball hat, chatted with a customer about their hometown team, the Chicago Cubs. This migratory population was the core of Goldman’s business; a full two-thirds lived in Scottsdale only during the winter. The Jewish population of cities like Scottsdale has been growing steadily over the past fifty years, fueled by the Sun Belt’s retirement developments, which cater to northern baby boomers and their parents.

  Rozalia Goldman didn’t particularly care about the deli market when she and her husband, Gregory, moved down from Chicago around 2000. Both Roza and Greg had worked together as colleagues at Kaufman’s in Skokie, and after Roza’s first husband passed away, she eventually fell for Greg, the Mexican cook. When I visited, Roza and Greg were vacationing in Mexico, so Anat, Roza’s daughter, took me back into the kitchen, where the cooking staff, made up entirely of Spanish-speaking Mexicans, brushed butter on the tops of flaky, delicious potato and mushroom knishes about to enter the oven. In every single delicatessen I had visited thus far in America, those doing the cooking were almost exclusively immigrants. In New York, deli workers were a mixture of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Arabs, and Chinese. In Florida, they hired Cubans, Haitians, and Central Americans. But overall, Mexicans were the predominant nationality.

  Mexican workers are picking the cucumbers in Mexico that are then shipped to Los Angeles, where they are pickled by Mexicans,
shipped to a deli by a Mexican driver, unloaded by a Mexican stock boy, then paired with a sandwich full of pastrami that was smoked by Mexican workers in New York, from cattle that were slaughtered by Mexicans in Iowa, on bread that was kneaded and baked by Mexican bakers in Detroit. Even the soda was stirred, canned, packed, and shipped by Mexicans. Sure, the deli will boast “Cooking just like bubbe used to make,” but in reality, it is Jose’s hands that make the difference between a well-rounded matzo ball and one that falls apart.

  According to the National Restaurant Association, one in five people involved in food service in the United States is Hispanic. Restaurants employ more foreign-born people than any other U.S. industry, but some Jewish customers have a grand expectation that nothing but Jewish hands will touch their food. Some even talk with open disgust about the cleanliness of Mexican workers. The perception of many deli owners toward their own immigrant staff is outright racist.

  Watching the golfers in Goldman’s watching a Mexican invasion on Fox news, chowing down on crisp sweet cherry blintzes prepared by the deli’s Mexican cooks, it all struck me as incredibly hypocritical. Gregory, who owned Goldman’s, was a product of Mexican migration. As Anat Goldman said, “He’s more Jewish than all of us, especially in the kitchen.” Mexican and Latin American workers had silently become the new Jewish mothers. Delicatessen fans nationwide owe them an overdue gracias.

  Katz’s Deli, Austin, Texas

  Sure, it was the state that brought George W. Bush to power, but Texas was also home to 130,000 Jews, mostly centered in Houston and Dallas. Texan Jews included oilmen, like Max Jaffe and Kinky Friedman, the cigar-chomping, Stetson-wearing author/ politician/musician who fronted the band Kinky Friedman and Texas Jewboys. Friedman was fond of the expression “May all your wishes be little gefilte fishes,” and when we spoke briefly on the phone, he personally recommended Katz’s Deli in Austin.

  Located just off the main streets of downtown Austin, Katz’s remained open twenty-four hours a day. The night I arrived was the start of the massive South by Southwest music festival, and I shared a table with a nice couple from Seattle who helped me devour two of Katz’s contributions to Texan/deli fusion: a platter of deep-fried, cornmeal-battered half-sour kosher dill pickles (with tangy ranch dressing), and a trio of kosher-style tacos filled with cubes of grilled salami, chunks of latkes, hot salsa, and fluffy scrambled eggs. It was a fine prelude to my meeting with Marc Katz the next day.

  To own and operate a Jewish deli deep in the heart of Texas requires a personality of enormous proportions, one that can appropriate the state’s famous swagger as its own. Marc Katz had this in spades. Upon my first bone-crushing handshake with the bald giant I was assailed by his sinister cackle. A native of Queens, N.Y., Katz was a descendant of kosher butchers. From his teenage years on, he worked in restaurants and delis around New York, including Meyer’s, the Turnpike Deli, and Charney’s. In 1977, he moved down to Austin for love and opened up Katz’s, an unabashedly boisterous New York deli (not at all related to the landmark on New York’s Lower East Side).

  “We’re selling an experience,” he told me as we sat over lunch. “A little bit of abruptness and you get it the way they do in New York City.” Texans, who were accustomed to a sort of y’all come back now civility, knew New Yorkers from the movies. They came in expecting to be insulted, and Katz played to that. “The main thing about Katz’s is that it’s a fun experience,” Katz told me. On cue, a customer leaned over and told Katz how much he loved Jewish food. In fact, the man said, he had a Jewish friend in Detroit. “Oh yeah?” Katz shot back, quick as Clint Eastwood on the draw. “Let me find someone that gives a shit. . . . boo ha ha ha!”

  Jewish clientele had always represented a small part of Katz’s overall business, around 10 per cent. “We promote ourselves as a New York deli, not a Jewish deli,” Katz said rather seriously. “A Jewish restaurant only appeals to Jews.” Liberal as Austin was, overt anti-Semitism still existed there, and Katz had been called a “Jew bastard” by rednecks more times than he cared to remember. Rather than throw his considerable weight around, though, Katz simply tried to win them over with kindness.

  “I love this restaurant so much. When I tell some guy, ‘I’m glad you’re here!’ that son of a bitch knows I mean it!”

  With that, he handed me his signature beverage, the Cheesecake Shake: a milkshake with a slice of Carnegie cheesecake tossed into the blender. Katz billed it as a “heart attack in a glass.” It took all of my lung capacity to coax a drop out of the straw, and as I sat there struggling to breathe, Katz shouted at my waiter.

  “Make sure this son of a bitch pays!”

  Kenny and Ziggy’s, Houston, Texas

  “Hey David, I’m Ziggy. So . . . nu? What’s the emmis? You want a nosh or a shtickl of something? Maybe some gehakte liver, or a bissel of matzo ball? Oy veysmear, my phone is ringing, hold on a minute, bubuleh.”

  At the start of my journey, sitting with Sy Ginsberg in Detroit, the first person he recommended I meet was Ziggy Gruber. “You won’t believe this guy,” Sy told me. “Ziggy’s like an old-fashioned Deli Man from the 1950s in the body of a young guy. You’ll just love him.” Ziggy was the first to admit that he was a rare breed—part of a new generation of old-fashioned Deli Men. I could easily have been talking to an eighty-year-old veteran of the New York deli scene in an established Manhattan delicatessen. Instead, I was staring at someone in his early forties, whose deli stood in a Houston strip mall.

  Ziggy had literally grown up in the New York deli world. His uncle and great-uncle owned Berger’s in the diamond district, and the Woodrow Deli in Long Island. His grandfather owned the famous Rialto Delicatessen on Broadway, where young Ziggy was put to work at the tender age of eight, stuffing cabbage and making knishes on top of a crate. He was every bit the seasoned Deli Man, except he watched Bugs Bunny on his coffee breaks. Eventually, Ziggy’s father and uncle initiated him into their own deli, Crest Hill Kosher, north of the city in Rockland County.

  Ziggy Gruber walked and talked with the confidence of his predecessors. He seemed to know everyone in the American deli business, their stories, problems, and family secrets. In my travels I’d met many second- and third-generation deli owners, but never anyone like Ziggy. He was more of a New York deli owner than most of the deli owners I’d met in New York, wielding Yiddish as though he had just stepped off a ship from Poland. Deli was Ziggy’s life, and he knew from an early age that if he didn’t try to save it, it would surely die.

  After the death of his beloved grandfather, Ziggy enrolled in culinary school in London. He worked at the famous Waterside Inn and did a stint in the kitchen with a young Gordon Ramsay. (“He wasn’t such a tough guy then,” Ziggy said, laughing. “I’ve seen him cry.”) When he returned to New York with his chef whites, his father hoped that Ziggy, then eighteen, would stay in fine dining. But all that changed when Ziggy and his dad attended the annual dinner of the Delicatessen Dealers’ Association of Greater New York. The association of Jewish deli owners had at one time boasted several hundred members. Its main purpose was to establish a collective presence for negotiating with unions and suppliers, but there was also a strong social element to the association, based on gambling and eating. But with delis closing down so frequently, the organization dwindled to just a few dozen members, disbanding in the late 1980s.

  “I’ll never forget. I looked around the room, it was all sixty- and seventy-year-old people, and it was sad to look. I said to myself: ‘Who is going to perpetuate our food if I don’t do it?’ That was my calling. The next day I went back to my dad and my uncle and I said, ‘I’ve had enough of this fancy-shmancy business, I’m going back into the delicatessen business.’”

  Ziggy quickly got to work, soon tripling sales, but when Rockland County’s demographics started shifting away from Jews, the family sold the deli. Ziggy headed to Los Angeles (where his brother was living) and opened up Ziggy G’s Delicatessen on Sunset Boulevard, but after just three successf
ul years he was forced to close because of a rent dispute with the landlord. He returned to New York in 2000 and began looking around for a deli to buy with Freddy Klein, the restaurant broker known for buying, selling, and leasing New York’s delis. Klein had heard that a friend’s son was looking to open up a Jewish delicatessen in Houston. Ziggy flew down and met with Kenny Friedman, who showed him a tightly knit Jewish community that was the largest in Texas and the Gulf Coast. The delicatessens that had once existed in the city were long gone, and the last one, Guggenheim, closed shortly before Ziggy arrived. “I took a look around and realized it wasn’t such a cow town,” Ziggy joked.

  These days, Ziggy presided over the deli alone, having bought out Kenny’s share. In Ziggy’s mind, there were two types of people: restaurant people and deli people. You could take a deli waiter and successfully put him in any five-star restaurant, but placing a restaurant waiter in a deli would be a disaster. The philosophy echoed famed New York writer Damon Runyon’s quote, displayed in Ziggy’s deli: “There are two types of people in this world, those who love Delis and those you shouldn’t associate with.”

  Ziggy wanted to make a further distinction, between full-blown Jewish delicatessen mavens, like himself, and people who happened to serve pastrami and corned beef sandwiches. To Ziggy, deli was a complete immersion in Yiddish culture and cuisine. Sure, lots of delis had corned beef, but his was pickled in barrels on site. He served rarely seen dishes like stuffed breast of veal, and gribenes, which are fried bits of crackling chicken skin, paired with chopped liver. He sold lox by either the Nova or belly cut, and hand-sliced the fish lengthwise over the whole side of salmon—so thin that you could actually see through it. His was a deli of the finest caliber, from the flanken short ribs boiling in the pots, to the Hebrew National salamis drying above the counter.