by David Sax
Ziggy’s giant cabbage roll, the very kind he’d been making since he was in grade school, was so surprisingly light and fluffy that I assumed the meat inside had to have been veal. Nope, just beef stewed perfectly over the course of five hours, until every fiber melted into a stock that tasted like a French ragout. Every dish had a lightness to it, from the fluffy kasha varnishkes and egg-mushroom-barley sides, to the massive vegetable latkes, made from carrots, zucchini, and garlic and then served with a stewed apricot glaze. The giant noodle kugel had the airy consistency of a soufflé.
Kenny and Ziggy’s was undoubtedly one of the best delis in the country. In Ziggy, I saw a traditionalist succeeding in the modern market. Sure, he did what was necessary to stay current, like adding large salads to his menu, but he did so without sacrificing the core of his cuisine. “The key with my deli,” he said, “and I think this is a shanda [shame], is that there aren’t too many places or people who take the pride that I do in this. Yes, some small places do here and there, but if you went to a deli back in the early twentieth century, I’d guarantee you that each was better than the last, and better than most you find today. Why? Because they were family places, they had lots of competition, and they made everything from scratch.”
Here in suburban Houston, Ziggy was cooking the way his grandfather had taught him. It was the same care and deliberate attention that Rose Guttman put into her matzo balls in Michigan. If a new mold of Deli Men were going to save the deli from extinction, Ziggy Gruber would make an ideal leader.
Kosher Cajun New York Deli and Grocery, New Orleans, Louisiana
TOUGH TIMES Don’t Last
TOUGH PEOPLE DO!!
These defiant words, written in colorful chalk and presented in an elaborate, gold-embossed frame, spoke to the pain of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction and the strength of renewal. Driving into New Orleans, I saw abandoned neighborhoods rotting on either side of the highway. New Orleans had survived Katrina, but only in shattered fragments.
“We kinda saw the storm brewing before Shabbos,” Joel Brown said, retelling his story as we sat in his recently renovated glatt kosher delicatessen and grocery store. Brown was a short man, with dark, full cheeks, and a soft demeanor. No one in the family watched television or turned on a radio that day, but Brown knew things were bad when he was walking to synagogue. People were frantically packing cars and boarding up windows. “As soon as Shabbat was over, we turned on the Tv and saw it coming,” he recalled. “Sunday morning we boarded up the store and the house.”
For twelve hours, the Brown family, including Joel’s wife, Natalie, and their three young daughters, crawled on choked freeways toward Memphis. The sky turned pitch black. Somewhere along the road, their dog had a heart attack and died. For two days they lived in a motel, glued to the television, and when the levees broke on August 29, Joel turned to Natalie and said, “Oh my god, the city is destroyed.” He prayed everyone had made it out alive, and then he thought about his deli.
New Orleans had never been a large deli town, despite its love of fatty foods and big sandwiches. As Southern Jewish food historian Marcie Cohen Ferris wrote in her book Matzo Ball Gumbo, the city’s German Jewish community was obsessed with integration into the halls of elite society and eschewed kosher eating. But by the turn of the twentieth century, a small Jewish area had taken shape around Dryades Street, populated by increasing numbers of Eastern European immigrants. Small delis opened to serve them, like the Southern Matzos Bakery, and then later Pressner’s, the Kansas Deli and Bakery, and Ralph Rosenblatt’s.
The city’s last kosher deli, Ralph’s, closed in the 1970s, and for three decades New Orleans’ Jewish families had to drive to Alabama just to buy kosher food. Joel Brown and his wife were both natives of New Orleans. Though the community was small, roughly ten thousand before Katrina, Brown characterized it as one of the closest he’d ever seen in America. “I’ll tell ya,’ we’re stronger Jews for it. I look at my customers from Gulf Coast communities, who have to drive two hours here and two hours back just to shop for kosher food, and I see strength.”
Sensing an opportunity in this, Joel had opened the Kosher Cajun New York Deli and Grocery in 1987. Jewish clients came for kosher groceries, while deli sandwiches attracted gentiles. Brown began catering all over the Deep South and was even hired by supermarkets to consult on their kosher purchases. Then Katrina drowned it all.
“Ten days after the storm, we got six guys from the community together and drove back down,” Brown said, in a syrupy voice thick with Delta drawl. “When we came into the city there were helicopters flying over, flashing searchlights, and Humvees prowling the streets with armed troops pointing guns out the windows. It looked like a war zone. Around our neighborhood, trees were uprooted and tossed through houses like toothpicks. We were speechless.”
Metairie, eight miles west of downtown New Orleans, had escaped the worst of the flooding, though two feet of water had nevertheless inundated the deli. When Brown pried open the doors, he was quickly overpowered by the smell of rancid gefilte fish floating for a week in 100°F heat. Before he could make it out the back door, Brown threw up in the middle of his deli. Kosher Cajun sustained over $300,000 in damage (covered by insurance) and had to be completely rebuilt. Over three months, Brown commuted twenty times between Memphis and New Orleans during construction. He often questioned reopening.
“I had a building that was standing, but no one was around. I could lose more money reopening than just shutting. I mean there was no electricity, no water, no anything. If the building had blown down, the insurance company would have written me a big fat check and that would have been that.” But Brown felt he was needed in New Orleans and Kosher Cajun reopened on November 17, 2005, less than three months after Hurricane Katrina. His initial clients for the first few months were FEMA workers, construction crews, and contractors from out of town. Though more than 30 per cent of the Jewish community never returned to the city, Kosher Cajun gained new customers from locals and foreign relief groups. A year and a half later, Joel Brown’s eyes still welled up with tears when he discussed the ordeal.
“Hey,” he said, snapping out of it, “let me get you a sandwich.” Brown came back a few minutes later with the J&N special: hot corned beef and pastrami on dark rye with mustard, horseradish, and coleslaw. The bread was hot, studded with caraway seeds, and had a dark crust that boasted a crispness I hadn’t tasted since L.A. Up to that point I could honestly say that every glatt kosher deli sandwich I’d eaten was a disappointment, a symptom of the industrial processing that suppliers used to cut down on high costs. In contrast, the J&N was simply wonderful. First the wallop of steaming pastrami on the roof of my mouth mixed with the cool tang of coleslaw. Then the spicy mustard and horseradish kicked in with the pastrami’s pepper, building to an incendiary crescendo. In a time when delis the world over were dying from man-made troubles—real estate, profit margins, and assimilation—Brown’s delicatessen had risen from one of the worst natural disasters in American history. That sandwich was a minor miracle.
The New York Corned Beef Society of Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia
Deli in the Deep South. Sure, Jewish families have lived in southern states for as long as Jews have been in America, but the prospect of pastrami and gravy-covered biscuits in the Bible Belt just seemed wrong. To misquote Lenny Bruce, if the north is Jewish, the south is goyish. But deli wasn’t foreign to the south. Charleston, South Carolina, once had a thriving deli scene in its “Little Jerusalem” neighborhood. Gottlieb’s was once a legendary spot in Savannah, Georgia. Memphis had Rosen’s, Goldstein’s, Segal’s, and Miner’s. In Atlanta, dozens of delicatessens used to occupy Jewish neighborhoods, including Siegel’s, Gold’s, Merlin’s, Mazian’s, Nathan’s, and the Economy Deli. Jackson, Mississippi, once hosted places such as the Olde Tyme Deli.
In their early years, Jewish delicatessens walked a precarious middle ground between heavily restrictive white society and segregated black communities. In many
cases, neighborhood delicatessens were among the South’s first integrated restaurants. There were exceptions. Leb’s Pig Alley, a Jewish delicatessen in Atlanta owned by Charles Lebedin (a.k.a. Charlie Leb), firmly refused to integrate in the early 1960s. After tossing a black customer onto the street in 1963, Leb’s became the focus of sit-ins and clashes between demonstrators and the police, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Ku Klux Klansmen in hooded robes. Under tremendous pressure from the Jewish community, including Jews who participated in sit-ins, Lebedin grudgingly relented and served blacks, but Leb’s Pig Alley went under shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, one deli that many were undoubtedly content not to save.
One by one, the South’s Jewish delicatessens disappeared. Today there are very few Jewish delis operating in Southern states. This is not because the Jewish population has declined in the South. In fact, the population in places like Atlanta and Charlotte is growing steadily, thanks to retiring Northern baby boomers. But for deli lovers who make this migration, the disappointment awaiting them between slices of lifeless rye provokes much kvetching. One man decided to do something about it.
One Sunday each month, crowds of people jostle for tables at Twain’s, a bar outside Atlanta. They come not for the house-brewed ales or chicken wings, but for a brief membership in the New York Corned Beef Society of Atlanta (NYCBSA). They’ll pay a few dollars for initiation and in return receive a steaming, hand-sliced hot corned beef or pastrami sandwich, plus coleslaw, potato salad, and a pickle. Walking through the crowd will be Howard Wurtzel, a retired Freudian psychoanalyst and artist originally from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, whose obsession with Jewish deli created this phenomenon.
Drafted into the army in the late 1960s, Wurtzel was shipped down to Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, where he and other Jewish doctors rhapsodized about Katz’s deli. On a whim, Wurtzel bought some briskets from a local supermarket, cured his own corned beef, and threw a party on the base. Four decades later, both of Wurtzel’s children moved down to Atlanta to operate Twain’s, and Wurtzel followed suit with his wife, Ettie. He soon began exploring Atlanta’s deli scene, much to his disappointment. His solution was to throw a corned beef party. In October 2005, he printed up a few flyers, stating that the New York Corned Beef Society of Atlanta would gather at Twain’s the following Sunday. Wurtzel and his family cured, cooked, and sliced the meat for thirty-five or so ex-northerners. Next month the crowd was slightly larger, including a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who wrote a story for the paper’s front page. Close to three hundred people showed up the following month. Around town Wurtzel is known as the “Corned Beef King.” He considers this the biggest accomplishment of his life.
Pickled Politics, Washington, D.C.
Though home to a good number of Jews, many of whom occupy positions high and humble, it must be stated that the nation’s capital is probably the WASPiest place in America. This is a city where bowties are actually cool and creamed corn regularly appears on menus during Republican administrations. “Washington is a place where Jews were outsiders even when they were extremely powerful,” remarked Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic. “The culture of the city is one of a club-oriented atmosphere, which almost by definition shuts Jews out.”
Jews may hold some influence on Capitol Hill or even in the west wing of the White House, but their acceptance by mainstream America has always been a delicate matter. D.C. represents the average American, and Jewish culture hasn’t quite won his heart. Though delis existed over the years around D.C. (Frisco’s, Baltimore Deli, Terlitsky’s, Posin’s, Hoffberg’s), they were never really adopted as something sufficiently “American.” Despite classic delis like Attman’s, Weiss’s, and Lenny’s just an hour away in Baltimore, D.C.’s attempts to mix political power with pickled peppers had fallen flat.
There was one grand exception though, and its name was Duke Zeibert’s.
From the Truman administration until the early years of Bill Clinton’s reign, Duke Zeibert’s ruled Washington power dining. Less a deli and more of a “Judeo-American Restaurant,” Duke Zeibert’s was the place for big names to be seen in D.C. At its zenith, it was the D.C. equivalent of Le Cirque, with the dapper Zeibert greeting guests, complimenting powerful women, and reinforcing D.C.’s social hierarchy.
Positioned just five blocks from the White House, Duke Zeibert’s quickly became the toast of Washington soon after opening in 1950. Real estate honchos, baseball players, lawmakers, politicians, and gamblers made themselves at home, dining on such classic Jewish dishes as chicken in the pot and chopped liver. Duke Zeibert’s was a place of white-gloved service and starched linens, where champagne was served alongside broiled tongue, and the menu contained not just corned beef, coleslaw, pickles, and flanken, but clams casino, steaks, and spring lamb chops. It was Jewish enough to bring chutzpah to the city, but had enough WASP standards on the menu to satisfy regular customers like President Harry Truman.
“The first time I came in, I thought it was a Jewish wedding,” recalled Mel Krupin, who managed Duke Zeibert’s as its powerful maître d’ from 1968 until 1980. “It was all mink stoles and suits.” As head of the house, Krupin quickly learned the importance of Zeibert’s ranking when it came to assigning tables. The most coveted were those closest to the windows by the front. These would be reserved for luminaries like Howard Cosell, Muhammed Ali, Milton Berle, J. Edgar Hoover, and Robert Kennedy. In the center of the room would sit less important regulars, like Jimmy Hoffa or junior congressmen. A second section, found behind a wooden trellis, was reserved for nobodies and those whose power had been stripped. They called it Siberia, because it was akin to being thrown into the social gulag. Krupin remembered bejeweled women wrapping their arms around the divider in protest, saying “I don’t eat in that room!”
In 1980, the building was sold to developers, and Duke Zeibert retired to Arizona. Mel Krupin received Duke’s blessing to carry on the torch in his absence, opening Mel Krupin’s just blocks away. But Duke was restless, and within four years, he returned to D.C. to reopen his namesake restaurant, forty feet away from Krupin’s. The press dubbed it a “Matzo Ball War,” and for a brief period the streets ran red with borscht until Krupin went out of business. “I worked for the man like he was my father,” Krupin said, still bitter. “I really don’t want to talk about Duke. It has no meaning to me.” Perhaps fittingly Duke’s didn’t last much longer.
Dreams of marrying delis and political elites still seduce the occasional ego in D.C. In 2002, an Orthodox Jewish Republican lobbyist named Jack Abramoff opened Stack’s Delicatessen, the only glatt kosher deli in D.C. Abramoff expected Stack’s to attract Jewish power brokers, kosher lawmakers, Israel lobbyists, politicians, and representatives from Jewish organizations. When the Jewish press found that a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraiser at Stack’s broke campaign finance laws, the “Picklegate” scandal emerged. Months later, charges were being brought against Abramoff for a number of political kickback schemes. Stack’s closed shortly thereafter, and Jack Abramoff ended up in jail for fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion.
Florida: Where Deli Goes to Die
“Did you hear about Rose?”
“No.”
“Cancer.”
“What about Pearl?”
“Kidneys.”
“How long?”
“Who knows . . .”
“Oy.”
“Such a pain in my tuchus I got.”
“You should get that checked out, it could be Crohn’s.”
“God forbid.”
“I’m going to see how much longer we have to wait.”
“Tell them we’re wasting away to nothing out here!”
I’m waiting outside 3G’s Deli in Delray Beach, Florida, for a big loudspeaker to call my name. The youngest person out here, besides myself, is in her late sixties. Most are in their eighties. It’s late March. It’s sunny. It’s warm. No one has anywhere else to go, so they sit and wait for deli an
d kvetch. To some this would be living hell, but to elderly Jews in Florida it’s a heaven just miserable enough to know they are still alive.
“DAVID SOX!”
I stand and walk toward the door. Dozens stare with contempt. Inside wait freshly baked loaves of crusty rye, moist roast turkey breast carved right off the bone, and bowls of chicken soup packed with life-giving schmaltz. When their turn comes, a smile will broaden on the creased faces waiting outside, and their rumbling bellies will emit a soothing gurgle of content. For a brief moment they’ll be happy. Then, the kvetching will begin anew.
Florida is deli’s last stop in America. It is the place where Jewish delicatessen owners and eaters head into the mustard-colored sunset. There are innumerable little delis spread around the strip malls of Ft. Lauderdale, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, Sarasota, Hollywood, West Palm Beach, Boca Raton, and Aventura. These communities, many of which didn’t exist just twenty-five years ago, represent the third largest population of Jews in the United States, numbering roughly 850,000.
Deli in Florida is plentiful, omnipresent, and largely inexpensive. There are deli carving stations in the dining halls of retirement villages. In Pompano Park, a racetrack in Broward County, you can eat at the recently opened Myron’s. Even Florida’s Subway chain advertises a hot pastrami sub with one full pound of meat. But like that Subway sandwich, quantity seems to trump quality in Florida’s delis. Aside from my brief meal at 3G’s, which was the last deli I visited on the way out of Florida, very little stood out as exceptional. There were some good deli meals, but nothing remarkable.