by David Sax
This wasn’t how I remembered Florida, though I had been to Miami only once before, with my family, when I was six. Each morning I’d wake up, run into my parents’ room with my little brother Daniel, and jump up and down on their bed shouting, “Rascal House! Rascal House!” I recall long lines under a canopy outside and my mother trying to explain what a rascal was (which went something to the tune of “You and Daniel are rascals”). But mostly I remember the danish, because at Rascal House they brought out baskets of hot, sticky danish with every breakfast, and hot, steaming rolls with every lunch. I can’t recall what I ate besides those danish, but even now, over twenty years later, I can still picture my greedy little fingers, sticky with melted sugar, grabbing another.
When I heard the news late in 2006 that the Rascal House was going to be torn down and replaced by a condominium, I was crushed. The culprit behind it was none other than Jerry’s Famous Deli, a Los Angeles—based chain of delicatessens much reviled by deli owners. How could the most successful deli in one of America’s most populous Jewish communities possibly meet the wrecking ball? What factors had brought Florida’s delicatessens to the point where their greatest temples were being destroyed?
The Jews who populate Southern Florida are old. In Broward and Palm Beach counties, those over sixty-five years of age account for roughly half the Jewish population—more than twice the national average, though it is a relatively recent development. Jews were actually forbidden to buy property in Miami Beach up until 1936, when real estate signs for new houses boasted “Always a view, never a Jew.” Soon after the war, Miami Beach became a Jewish vacation destination and the area’s Jewish population rapidly swelled, overwhelming any attempts to restrict it. There were kosher hotels like the Saxony and delis galore, such as the Southbeach, the Uptown, Villa, the Gourmet Shop, Junior’s (of Brooklyn cheesecake fame), Wolfie’s, and Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House.
The large migration of retirees to Florida didn’t begin until the 1960s. As the GI generation began retiring, many simply moved down to Florida full time. Grand Jewish hotels made way for more profitable condominiums. High-rise, low-cost aquamarine apartment buildings dominated the skyline as pensioners came to live out their golden years. According to Ira Sheskin, a demographer at the University of Miami, in 1982 62 per cent of Miami Beach’s population was Jewish. But that soon changed. Drug violence invaded Miami in the form of Scarface— style “cocaine cowboys.” Most of the retirees living in Miami Beach survived on fixed incomes, and their frugal lifestyle negatively affected economic growth in the area, which felt like a cross between Rio’s mean streets, and a shtetl by the sea. Delis began closing down, as fearful residents moved to communities farther north in Broward and Palm Beach counties. Many of these were gated suburbs, which offered a protective way of life. The lawns were larger, the houses more spacious, and security monitored the premises day and night. To skeptics who lived outside the gates, these new suburbs were “Fancyville Ghettos.”
Toward the end of the 1980s, many of Miami Beach’s oceanfront properties were reoccupied by a burgeoning gay community. South Beach became the retreat of Madonna and Versace, and the city spawned countless low-fat, low-carb diet fads. Real estate began soaring in value, and the remaining elderly Jewish residents who hadn’t fled from the crime now fled the rising rents. Between 1994 and 2004 alone, Jewish households in Miami Beach dropped by over 50 per cent. Today, there are fewer than seventeen thousand Jewish residents of Miami Beach, a tremendous decline in just two decades. Synagogues have closed down or sit empty. In less than a generation, an entire community was built up and taken apart. But hey, that’s Florida, where little is made to last.
“Miami Beach was Jewish back then. Period!” said Arnie London, the former owner of Arnie and Richie’s, the last original deli in Miami Beach until it was sold to the Roasters’ n Toasters chain in 2008. When I spoke with London a year before the sale, his local clientele were quickly disappearing. As we talked, a friend walked in and told London that yet another patron had passed away the night before. A tall, lean man, with a cropped gray mustache and perpetual look of scorn, London just sighed loudly and shook his head. “These are the old-time regulars, the first generation who came in,” he said, staring deep into my eyes. “I can name them all. These were sweet people, real people, down-to-earth normal people. It’s the end of an era.”
The point, London made sure to note, was that his older customers weren’t being replaced by deli eaters. While Florida’s Jewish population overall is actually growing, the demographic shift is occurring away from retirees, toward younger families and the orthodox. On the surface this is positive. Delis need new clients. But younger Jewish families are less inclined to eat deli, and businesses that rely on a steady stream of golden oldies are in the unenviable position of watching their customer base literally die off.
So much of Florida’s deli business is seasonal. At some Floridian delicatessens, seasonal clients (who stay from Thanksgiving until Passover) add an additional 30 per cent or more to sales. This creates intense periods of business, where the place might be packed from breakfast until dinner, but it also ensures up to eight months when things are dead quiet. Older clients tend to be demanding customers. Often the price required to keep them loyal is enough to make a deli owner lose whatever hair he has left.
“Old Jewish people? Do you want to know what they’re like?” London asked, raising a crooked eyebrow, leaning in close and lowering his voice. “They know what they want and they want what’s good, but they don’t want to pay the true price for it because they remember what it once was.”
Bob Weinstein, the handsome owner of the Bagel Cove, in Aventura, put it differently. As he stared out at a sea of silver heads, all of whom were loudly slurping soup, he said to me, sotto voce, “This is not a yuppie community. These people aren’t working in a stock market making $25 million a year. This is their job.” Every complaint was just another day at the office. The more they made, the more productive they were. “They want raisin muffins without raisins and apple danish without apples! Forget it.”
A large number of delicatessen owners and workers in Florida are also in various stages of their golden years. Most came to retire and soon found themselves working harder than ever. Bob Weinstein owned twenty-one bakeries and four restaurants back in New York, before retiring to Aventura, but soon grew bored. “I was going out of my mind,” he said during Bagel Cove’s packed lunch hour. “How much golf can you play? How much bullshit can you talk? That’s the plight of 99 per cent of people here who have retired. They’re here because they have no choice.” Old Deli Men migrate around Florida like flamingos. In many cases, they cut meat right until their very last breath. One owner told me a story about a seventy-five-year-old counterman who went home the week before to take a nap between shifts and never woke up.
None of this leads to a warm feeling within Florida’s Jewish delicatessens. With owners and customers who are cantankerous and counting down the days, the atmosphere is decidedly grouchy. Florida’s deli owners greeted me with a sense of suspicion that I never encountered elsewhere, and they extended the same ill feelings to their competitors. Floridian Jewish deli owners didn’t know about other delis, didn’t like talking about other delis, and certainly didn’t associate with other deli owners. If Los Angeles taught me that the overall health of a deli community could benefit from friendly relations between Jewish delicatessens, Florida demonstrated that it can ruin a town for deli.
Florida also tends to be dominated by bagel-delis. These are combined bagel bakeries, appetizing stores, dairy restaurants, and delicatessens. The decline of the deli has been shadowed by the meteoric rise of the bagel. Once the specialty of Jewish bakeries, bagel orders in America grew 92 per cent between 1993 and 1998. I’ve encountered bagel-delis elsewhere in the country, but never to the extent that I witnessed in Florida, where their presence was near total. I found them all largely disappointing. With so much effort put into baking bagels, de
li meats and kitchen dishes suffered.
One of the few stand-alone delis I encountered in Florida was the Pomperdale Deli in Ft. Lauderdale. Its owner, Larry Vogel, another ex-Brooklynite, was in his late seventies, well-sunned, bald, with a set of pearly dentures. People were always pleading with Vogel to broaden Pomperdale’s menu away from deli, but he firmly refused. “This is what I do,” Vogel said, pointing to the towering pastrami-corned beef combo sitting before me on the counter, a flash of spicy brown mustard seeping out over the meat. “I have men here who know how to slice and build a sandwich.” It was a fine sandwich, among the best in Florida, but even Vogel knew that a great sandwich wasn’t enough to survive in this climate. “I always worry about what’s going to happen to this place,” he told me. “There’s so many other corporate restaurants here. All they have to do is just huff and puff and blow delis down.” I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Since opening in 1954, Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House had been a sensation. The deli followed on the success of Cohen’s eponymous Wolfie’s, which had debuted in the heart of Miami Beach seven years earlier, at the peak of South Beach’s postwar Jewish boom. Wolfie’s set the standard for deli in Florida, and when Cohen expanded his burgeoning empire, he set up shop in the then underdeveloped suburb of Sunny Isles. (Over the years Wolfie’s prospered under different owners, eventually in three separate locations, but the last one closed in 2001.)
The infrastructure of Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House was purpose built for crowd control. To shade those waiting for up to an hour, a canopy snaked along the side of the expansive delicatessen. Once in the doors, you entered a type of human sorting apparatus: several rows of rails separated parties with large signs clearly marking where “Singles,” “Parties of 2,” “Parties of 3 or 4,” and “Parties of 5 or more” waited for seats.
Rascal House went on to become the most famous deli south of New York. There were three full-sized rooms, a huge oval counter, and a separate takeout section. In all, it could seat 425, making it one of the world’s largest delis. No visit to Florida was ever complete without a trip to the Rascal House. During peak tourist season, crowds would line up from breakfast until four in the morning.
Even though I hadn’t been in over twenty years, the first thing that struck me when I walked into the Rascal House in 2007 was how easy it was to do so. It was Sunday at 11.30 a.m. in March, as prime time as it got for deli anywhere, let alone Miami Beach. There should have been dozens of people waiting, but we waltzed right into a large circular booth of rose-colored Naugahyde. I had gone with my cousin Eric Katz, who was in town for business. Within minutes of sitting, our waitress deposited a small plate of buttery mini-danish on the table.
“Do they just give you these?” asked Eric, as if he’d just won the lottery. Sticky, messy, and sinfully sweet, the little butter-soaked temptations were every bit as good as I’d remembered. Small, warm rugelach were flaky and filled with dense, sugary veins of chocolate. Beside them lay two-bite cheese danish, with dough the consistency of a Parisian croissant, containing oozy cheese that tasted of sweet ricotta. Buried beneath was a single apricot roll, which Eric dispatched in one greedy chomp. The waitress returned a minute later with a quartet of fist-sized cinnamon buns studded with raisins and covered in frantic Jackson Pollock brushstrokes of melted icing sugar.
This scene was played out under the watchful eyes of Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal, which resembled a sinister version of Casper the Ghost: a white, soft-edged little man with a pointed tail and giant head, topped by a white sailor’s cap with a big red R on it. Behind his back, the Rascal held a trident, but above his head burned a glowing halo. No character represented the complex relationship between a deli and its customers more. Here was a place where one indulged in the holiest of sins, a sort of blessed gluttony that was reviled by cardiologists but approved by psychologists; where guilt in the mind met pleasure in the belly; where one’s stomach could take a holiday in the midst of vacation.
This was the Rascal House I remembered and would soon mourn. It was destined for the junkyard sometime a year later, in 2008, when The Epicure, a mixed-use condominium complex, was set to rise on its footprint. The Epicure would be a fourteen-story behemoth of glass and steel, with swimming pools, a luxury gymnasium, and spa facilities. According to the developers, Jerry’s Famous Deli Inc., the whole project would be designed for discerning culinary customers, with top-grade kitchens in each unit and delivery from the Epicure gourmet market on the ground floor of the building. The original Epicure Market, in South Beach, grew from a small Jewish grocery into a place where celebrities now shop for extravagant foods and wines. There were no plans to preserve any part of the Rascal House in the new development. It had a standing date with the wrecking ball. “Rascal House has been here since 1954, and it’s an institution,” Jerry’s Famous Deli Inc. vice president Jason Starkman told the South Florida Business Journal. “But we’re basically replacing one institution with another.”
Basically??? Here you had a revered Jewish deli institution torn down by a corporate Jewish deli in the service of a luxury Jewish grocery. It was all just too disgustingly ironic—cultural cannibalism at its most repugnant.
Whether The Epicure condominium complex will ever be revered as an institution on par with the Rascal House is doubtful. If it’s ever built, The Epicure will be seen as a late entry to Miami’s millennial condo bubble, announced right as the subprime meltdown hit. Though the condo was indefinitely shelved, Rascal House was still torn down in April 2008 and replaced with an Epicure market. Rascal’s death will be seen as another bold move by Jerry’s Famous Deli Inc., the nation’s most controversial deli.
Jerry’s started in 1978, when Isaac “Ike” Starkman, a retired Israeli air force lieutenant, and his then partner (named Jerry), opened a delicatessen in Encino, California. Starkman soon took full control and transformed Jerry’s into a general restaurant, expanding the menu tremendously with dishes that had no relation to Jewish delicatessen. In interviews over the years, Starkman stated his belief that while traditional deli foods have a nostalgic value, he feels no loyalty to them. By the late 1980s, the success of Jerry’s as a twenty-four-hour restaurant allowed Starkman to open three other outlets in greater Los Angeles, plus a cigar lounge adjoining the Beverly Hills location.
Then in 1995, Starkman did what no other deli had ever done. In a highly risky move, he took Jerry’s Famous Deli Inc. public, listing the stock on the NASDAQ exchange, under the symbol DELI. The IPO quickly raised $9.2 million, which allowed the company to finance further expansion. In 1996, Jerry’s opened a Pasadena branch and purchased Solley’s, a well-known deli in the San Fernando Valley, as well as another deli, which was closed and reopened under the Jerry’s name. Further stock sales generated $11 million, which financed the purchase of Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House and its property in 1996 (for close to $5 million). Cohen had died ten years previously, and his family ended their involvement in the business. Epicure was purchased in 1998 for over $9 million in cash and stock, though members of the Thal family were retained to manage the business. In 1998, Starkman opened a second Rascal House in Boca Raton, Florida, and in 2001, Jerry’s Famous Deli opened a location in South Beach.
But the stock of Jerry’s Famous Inc. never really performed. Fewer than 150 investors purchased shares, mostly the Starkman family (Ike and sons Jason and Guy . . . also vice presidents) and several institutional investors. Though revenues grew from over $40 million in 1996 to over $70 million in 1999, with income nearly tripling, the stock price declined amid great market volatility, fluctuating from $6.66 to $1.88 per share in one quarter alone. By the end of 2001, Jerry’s Famous Inc. (DELI) had lost 80 per cent of its value. NASDAQ delisted the company and the Starkmans took Jerry’s Famous Deli Inc. private in a share buyback that cost $3,815,000. But what may have seemed like a misadventure in the stock market turned out to be crucial to Jerry’s success.
“What Starkman did was brilliant,” said an L.
A. deli owner. “He brought the company public, used the cash to finance a huge expansion, then bought it back cheap. It wasn’t great for investors, but for him it couldn’t have worked out better.”
When I visited the gorgeous art deco South Beach location of Jerry’s Famous Deli, which was filled with young, mostly gay, tourists eating breakfast, it was a disappointment. The vast menu, with everything from Cajun pitas to lobster tails, lost much in the mix. The blintzes my waiter brought, which were two small, lukewarm blond squares, arrived long after I’d ordered, during which time a fistfight broke out in the kitchen. The cheese was grainy and lacked any trace of creamy sweetness. They were served with cold strawberry jam. Along with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, the total came to just under twenty dollars! At the hostess’s desk near the entrance, Jerry’s had placed the very same quote I’d seen at Kenny & Ziggy’s: “As I see it, there are two kinds of people in this world: people who love delis, and people you shouldn’t associate with.” Jerry’s may have started out as a Jewish delicatessen, but I didn’t feel any love there.
Corporate delis run on a different foundation than other delicatessens. Theirs is the rationale of spreadsheets and consultants over tradition and instinct, and for many, it is the future of the deli business. Florida is a place where chains of corporate restaurants thrive and their effect is obvious to anyone who drives through the state.
Exit off the freeway and pull into any town or small city. You’ll soon be assaulted by the bright signs of the same food service outlets found off highways everywhere; Applebee’s, Friendly’s, TGI Friday’s, Cracker Barrel, Cheesecake Factory, Ruby Tuesdays, etc. . . . But go a little farther, as I always do, past the Wal-Mart and the Home Depot, and drive into the historic center of town. There, you’ll likely find archeological traces of what was once the American Main Street: empty gas stations, graffiti-covered town halls, and the dusty facade of a forgotten family diner. No one walks the streets here. The people are all back where the lights are brighter, drawn like moths, while Main Street quietly perishes. In this way, the death of America’s Jewish delicatessens isn’t unique. The problems that affect Jewish institutions continue to be harbingers of what will eventually happen to everyone else. When it comes to where Americans eat, corporations have leveraged your appetite into stock options.