Save the Deli

by David Sax

  The most successful corporate deli in Florida, and likely in the United States, is TooJay’s Original Gourmet Deli. It began, as almost all chains do, as a single operation in 1981 by Jay Brown and Mark Jay Katzenberg (two Jays), who were looking to start a lower-priced Jewish deli in Palm Beach. These days, TooJay’s (which no longer involves Brown or Katzenberg) has twenty-five locations, has more than seventeen hundred employees, opens an average of two new stores each year, and generates substantial profits in multiples of millions. The TooJay’s menu, while hardly bare bones, remains mostly true to classic Jewish dishes, featuring smoked sable, knishes, brisket platters, and all the usual soups and sandwiches. They cater bar mitzvahs, shivas, and bris’; arrange full dinners for the high holy days; and remain involved in local Jewish communities.

  At the head is Bill Korenbaum, the CEO and president, a friendly, straightforward middle-aged man from Long Island. The objective of a corporate chain, Korenbaum explained, is to control every aspect of the business in an efficient and predictable way. Most of the food served at TooJay’s is made in a large central commissary, where it is frozen, shipped to various outlets, and then prepared for service. Rarely does the word “cooking” enter into it. Instead, food is “reheated,” baked goods are “finished off,” and meals are “assembled.” Nothing is left to chance. “How many different ways are there to make a blintz or a stuffed cabbage?” Korenbaum asked me, pointing to TooJay’s blintz and stuffed cabbage, which would presumably look the same in the other twenty-four outlets. “There’s a hundred different [potential interpretations] for every type of Jewish dish. For us, we’d like to outsource as many products as possible if the quality is there.”

  Every decision, event, and transaction is computerized, sent to the head office, and reduced to statistical format, down to how many hours each store’s lights were on. Store managers cannot even select dinner specials without corporate approval. In corporate (deli) culture, the decisions that are the most important are made in boardrooms by CAs and MBAS. Nowhere does the knowledge of the DM, the Deli Man, come into play. His is a world of feeling and texture, but the Deli Man’s is experience that can’t be analyzed and multiplied, and corporate delicatessens must multiply in order to survive.

  “Individual, family-owned delis today are dead. They’re dead,” Korenbaum said. “Are they opening new ones? I don’t see it much. There’s such a barrier to entry because the costs are so high. This is an industry with the highest failure rate of any in the United States.” Still, family-owned delis, like the small Best Deli one plaza over, remained a threat. “Every restaurant is competition,” Korenbaum said. “I don’t care what it is, it’s going to affect your business. . . . If a mom and pop opened up next to us, they’d do more damage than another chain . . . more so than the Cheesecake Factory, because a deli is doing exactly what we do.”

  When it came down to taste, a family-run deli was likely going to give TooJay’s a run for their money. This isn’t to say that I disliked the food at TooJay’s. The bread was warm and crusty, and the meats were well steamed and sliced (they hired experienced countermen for stores in Jewish areas). But something was definitely missing in each bite. They all fell a little flat, as if the desire to appeal to what Korenbaum referred to as a “mainstream” customer base had dumbed down the flavor, as had all the freezing, outsourcing, and processing. At a family-owned deli I could look behind the counter or in the kitchen and see the person who had made my meal from scratch. Here I couldn’t, and that made all the difference.

  Corporate chains generally lean toward less remarkable food, but this needn’t be the case. One of the best delis I visited in Florida was Ben’s Kosher Deli in Boca Raton, an outlet of the Long Island chain. Ben’s owner, Ronnie Dragoon, is regarded as one of the most respected Deli Men in New York. Ben’s corned beef and tongues are pickled in barrels in each location’s kitchen. They serve rarely seen dishes like tongue polonaise, a hot casserole of sliced, fatty tongue, covered in a gooey sweet raisin sauce, and crisp, bubbly, fried kreplach packed with chopped seasoned beef and smothered in thick chunks of candied onion. Since opening in 2004, the Boca Raton location represents one of the most successful outlets in the whole Ben’s chain.

  “We’re selling more kishke out of this store than all the other stores combined,” says Boca’s manager, Michael Ross, a young, slim, experienced Deli Man with a dry wit. “I don’t want to cut this stuff out, and neither do the customers. When we put wraps on the menu we nearly had a revolt. One man came up to me, shook his finger, and said, ‘It’s a shanda that you sell wraps in a kosher deli.’” Ben’s succeeds with a kind of compassionate corporatism. Dragoon and Ross are both men who learned the business from behind the deli counter. Their fingers bear the scars of knife blades. Yes, they’re in the deli business to make money, and they know expansion is an element of that, but they are also in it because they truly love deli . . . something I suspect the Starkmans do not.

  Of all the deli owners I contacted for this book, Isaac (who passed away in summer, 2008) and Jason Starkman were the only ones who ignored my requests for an interview. But the visits I made to Rascal House during my brief time in Miami gave me a glimpse into what the corporate philosophy of Jerry’s Famous Deli Inc. could do.

  I went back to the Rascal House with my friend Jeffrey Kofman my last day in Miami, nearly a year before it was torn down. It was the middle of the week, and the small crowd that had been present the Sunday before was gone. We took a big booth underneath a Rascal statue and waited for a waitress. After ten minutes, I walked to the counter to get some service. As I came up, a young man with a pierced lip was screaming at one of the old waitresses. She was asking Adam (so said his name tag) for juice. She had a tray full of food; he was behind the counter with the juice dispenser. He must have been no older than twenty-five, and she no younger than seventy, but he just barked at her to “Fuck off!” When she backed away indignant, he smiled at me.

  “If it wasn’t for me, this place would be falling apart,” he said, folding his arms.

  “How come?” I asked.

  “I’m an all-star here,” he boasted. “I worked at Jerry’s before and I’m one of their personal favorites. They brought me over here to sort shit out, to get these old bags moving a little.”

  Another waitress walked up, and Adam snapped, “What the fuck do you want?”

  Though tempted to grab a hard salami and beat him over the head, I didn’t want to leave without one last taste of Rascal House. The waitress finally came to our table with a basket of hot challah rolls. Each roll was a small, perfect, golden loaf that exhaled a mini steam bath when you broke the crust. The food was another story. First came the bowl of chicken soup, a light broth with thick egg noodles and a small, single matzo ball. Jeffrey took a bite and put his spoon down, pushing the bowl toward me.

  “What, no good?” I asked.

  He shook his head. It was weak. Real weak. Watery broth had soaked into the matzo ball, rendering it a sponge of nothingness. A trio of meats arrived on a plate in front of us with a stack of rye. I laid the pastrami on a piece of dry rye and took a bite. It was cold in some places and warm in others. On my third bite I caught a tough fiber and had to chew like a hyena. The brisket was drier than the Sahara. The salami we ordered was actually bologna. Five minutes after the bill arrived, the waitress brought us the latke we’d ordered. It tasted like it was made of wood chips. I actually spat it out. Even though my breakfast there just days before was great, this was an atrocity. But hey, if the place was being torn down, what incentive was there to put any effort in? None.

  The deli’s manager, Nate, came over as I was taking photographs. I asked if I could talk to some of the staff. He went away to call his bosses at Jerry’s. I walked over to the nearest table where an older couple from Baltimore was just about to tear into a sandwich. I told them about the book, my trip, and how Rascal House would be closing. When I said that, their tanned faces dropped to the floor. They hadn’t kno
wn it was terminal and I’d just sucked away the joy of their visit. I felt awful.

  “Where will we go?” the wife asked her husband, genuinely worried.

  “I guess a hot dog stand or something.”

  Just then the manager returned. I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures or talk to any of the staff without the permission of Jerry’s Famous Deli Inc. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s corporate. You can’t do nothing without corporate. You gotta do what corporate says. They decide.”

  Part Three

  TRAVELS IN THE DELI DIASPORA

  A few years back, when I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city with plentiful beef and Latin America’s largest Jewish population, I felt sure there had to be some pickled brisket kicking about. Friends led me to Big Mamma, Argentina’s take on a New York Jewish deli. I ordered the Big Fresser’s Hot Pastrami on Rye, and what I got was some pre-sliced, microwaved semi-corned beef on spongy bread, drowning in sour mustard. I bit in, tasted the tangy, rather tough meat (which had no spicing to speak of), chewed on the “rye,” and was nevertheless transported back to a place I loved. By the standards of American deli it was atrocious, but the sheer chutzpah of eating that sandwich in Buenos Aires was the most affirming moment of my deli-obsessed life.

  When you remove a deli lover from his native land, his obsession for pickled meats intensifies. I have known people who have bribed border guards in Bangladesh to enter the country with a suitcase full of Montreal smoked meat. People have spent considerable sums exporting the Jewish deli concept abroad. Hong Kong, a city with a sizable foreign-born Jewish population (commerce + dim sum = Jews), has several delis. The city’s Jewish community center has a kosher restaurant, there’s a small deli called Archie B’s, and there’s also the Main Street Deli in the luxury Langham Hotel, which features something called the “Rudest Wall of Chocolate Cake.” There have even been Jewish restaurants in Havana, Cuba, where Jewish restaurants such as Moishe Pippic’s, Cafeteria Boris, Cooperativa, Waxman, and Sandberg served the burgeoning community there until Castro forced them all out of business.

  One place that’s never taken to Jewish delicatessen is Israel, even though it boasts more Ashkenazi Jews than anywhere else. You could not find a pastrami sandwich in Jerusalem if you had the Mossad looking for you. Yes, matzo ball soup and other Ashkenazi dishes exist in the Holy Land, but they’re pretty much cooked exclusively by grandmothers in private homes. The Israeli culinary landscape is dominated by the food of the Arabs. Hummus is everywhere, as is falafel, but searching for a knish in Israel is like trying to work out a peace deal in the region . . . heartbreaking, exhausting, and destined for failure.

  But elsewhere successful, homegrown Jewish delicatessens do exist in several large Ashkenazi communities outside America. They have evolved along with local tastes and circumstances, in ways that are at once similar to, and radically different from, the American deli experience. In places like Montreal, Toronto, London, Belgium, Paris, and Krakow, the common roots of Yiddish cooking have produced very different versions of the Jewish delicatessen.

  Montreal: A Smoked Meat Kingdom

  “You know if you had really, really been intent on entrapping me on my wedding night, you wicked woman, you would not have dabbed yourself with Joy, but in Essence of Smoked Meat. A maddening aphrodisiac, made from spices available in Schwartz’s delicatessen. I’d call it Nectar of Judea and copyright the name.”—from Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler

  Though I was born and raised in Toronto, my parents are both native Montrealers, leaving for Toronto in the late 1970s like so many of their contemporaries, fleeing the unstable politics of Quebec’s separatists. Though her childhood home was just steps from Snowdon Deli, one of Montreal’s finest, Mom rarely ate delicatessen. Her Canadian-born parents, Evelyn and Stanley Davis, were the furthest thing from Bubbe and Zaide. Grandma cooked from a pantry stocked with cans and powders, often tossing together “concoctions” from leftovers. They ate every meal with a glass of milk. Though they were decidedly Jewish in religion and race, at the table they were basically goyish.

  My deli genes came from my father’s side. Though both his parents came to Canada when they were children, they retained the flavor of Romania and Hungary. Long after “Poppa” Sam Sax died at the hands of that fatal sandwich, Daniel and I would visit the apartment of our “Granny” Ella Sax and head straight for her kitchen. On the stove, pots of sweet and sour meatballs bubbled. Our favorite treat waited in the oven: her baked rice pudding, a family secret made without any dairy. We’d douse it with maple syrup and chew on the crispy bits of rice while hot raisins burst in our mouths like juicy bombs. Dad would often drive us around his old haunts downtown, through the city of “Poppa” Sam, a garment worker who toiled in Montreal’s schmatte business with limited success, and dressed his kids “sharp as a matzo ball.”

  Dad initiated us into the rituals of Montreal Jewish manhood, like the way to ask for the hottest hand-rolled bagels, fresh from the wood-fired oven at St. Viateur Bagel Bakery. It was my father and his best friend, Stephen Rothstein, who first brought me to Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen, Dad pointing out the piled white slices of speck in the shop’s window, saying, “This is what killed Poppa Sam,” while Rothstein correctly demonstrated the way to eat karnatzel, a long, thin Romanian beef salami that Montrealers hang to dry until it literally snaps. Rothstein took a single slice of rye, painted it with yellow mustard, and rolled it around the dark stick of meat. It was the first time I ever ate mustard, and I recall how its sour tinge perfectly offset the garlicky beef.

  Even after all the great delicatessens I’ve visited around the world, nothing matches Montreal. It is nirvana for deli purists. Visiting New Yorkers remark how much Montreal’s delis remind them of all that their city has lost. Montreal’s delis have remained stubbornly original in their decor, food preparation, and menus. If the deli is to be saved, a large part of the solution lies in the mysterious Montreal smoked meat.

  Smoked meat first appeared in Montreal around 1890, when a Romanian immigrant named Aaron Sanft opened Montreal’s first kosher butcher shop. A large percentage of the Jews who came to Montreal were Romanian, and Romania’s Jewish food traditions specialized in spicing and smoking. For nearly a century, the accepted tale of the smoked meat sandwich’s origins lay with Ben Kravitz, the founder of Ben’s Delicatessen, who had arrived in Montreal from Lithuania in 1899, with fifteen dollars and a bullet wound in the heel, courtesy of a Polish border guard. His wife, Fanny, opened a small fruit stand and candy shop in 1910, and Kravitz claimed to recall the method Lithuanian farmers used to cure and smoke briskets. He pickled the meat in brine and smoked it over hickory bark in the small backyard of the shop, then sliced it, and served it on rye bread with mustard. The smoked meat sandwich was born, so Ben’s legend went.

  This was taken as gospel until a local historian named Eiran Harris uncovered a potential predecessor, Herman Rees Roth, who had owned a deli in New York until 1908, when he moved to Montreal and opened the British American Delicatessen Store, where he served smoked meat sandwiches, predating Ben’s by over a year.

  While Montreal smoked meat’s origins may lie in Romania, Lithuania, or even the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it is now Montreal’s own. Outside the city it is always referred to as Montreal smoked meat, but in Montreal, it is simply called smoked meat or le smoked meat and is eaten with religious devotion. When I spoke about it in the United States, deli lovers gravitated toward each word. “I gotta get my hands on this stuff,” they’d say, to which I sadly informed them that shipping it across the border was impossible. They had to go to Montreal; few did. But when people asked me what, exactly, smoked meat was, I had no satisfactory answer. I found it at Schwartz’s.

  Schwartz’s Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen. Schwartz’s Charcuterie Hebraique de Montreal. Schwartz’s. Chez Schwartz. Across Canada, the mere mention of Schwartz’s brings to mind smoked meat, and the words smoked meat trigger the name Schwartz’s. Schwart
z’s seats sixty very cramped customers crammed six abreast along the left wall, separated by a narrow aisle from half a dozen seats along a counter. It is tiny, barely larger than a tractor-trailer, perhaps one-tenth the size of Katz’s. There are no knishes at Schwartz’s, no egg creams, chopped liver, soups, or coffee. You cannot get your smoked meat sandwich on anything but seedless rye, and it is always served with mustard. The menu exists on thin paper placemats and faded backlit photos. Though broiled rib steaks were the draw in the deli’s first four decades, it is smoked meat that has made Schwartz’s arguably the most famous restaurant in all of Canada. Schwartz’s is the only deli enshrined in both a book (Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen: The Story by Bill Brownstein) and a documentary film (Chez Schwartz directed by Gary Beitel).

  Reuben Schwartz opened his restaurant in the heart of the garment district, along Main Boulevard, in 1928. Though Schwartz was supposedly a horrendous boss, gambler, philanderer, and businessman (he lost Schwartz’s just four years after opening), the recipe he brought with him from Romania lives on. Montreal smoked meat is the bastard child of pastrami and corned beef. If pastrami is spiced, smoked navel and corned beef is pickled, boiled brisket, then Montreal smoked meat (listen carefully) is a combination of the two: a brisket cured and smoked like a pastrami, with slightly different spicing.