Save the Deli

by David Sax

  Harry Morgan’s was opened in 1948 by an East End butcher and his wife, Ray, along the High Street of St. John’s Wood. After Harry dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of the store, Ray continued to run the business from her perch behind the register. Inside one found an intersection of shady gangsters and East End bookies. “I remember Harry Morgan’s as a kid,” Tillman recalled. “They had curtains on the windows and big Sopranos type guys who could really shovel in a salt beef or chopped liver sandwich. All these guys had eaten their whole lives was fried food, and of course they all lived to a hundred! I remember you used to have to fight the smoke back. Today it would be closed by the health department.” Later, Ray Morgan relinquished much of the business to a young Israeli manager, who subsequently gambled away the restaurant.

  Tillman took over in 2000, backed by his restaurateur father. At age twenty-four, the graduate of restaurant and hospitality school successfully transformed Harry Morgan’s into one of the few London Jewish delis with broad appeal. Before Tillman, Harry Morgan’s clientele was almost exclusively Jewish. Now it was only 65 per cent Jewish. Out went the smoke and the curtains. In came a bright café with an adjoining takeout area. Tillman had opened additional locations: a smaller outlet right off busy Oxford Street, a kiosk in the swank food hall at the luxury Harrods department store, plus licensed Harry Morgan’s branches in several office towers throughout London, supplied by a commissary. Harry Morgan’s also sold merchandise at Harrods, including prepared foods and a set of dishware embossed with the names of deli foods. There was a delivery service, plans for additional units around England, and yes, offers from Las Vegas.

  “We’ve even been approached by a food-service company in Dubai,” Tillman said, adding how the success at Harrods sparked an Arab interest in Jewish delicatessen. A big part of his weekly business now came after Friday services let out down the street at the London Central Mosque, the largest in all of Britain. His meat wasn’t kosher, but interestingly enough, it was halal, and Muslim customers were a growing part of the business. Tillman had done what no one in Britain had managed to do before; he’d successfully taken delicatessen beyond the Jewish community.

  “When I took over the business, delis in London were disappearing,” Tillman said, as we both tucked into large bowls of gorgeous chicken soup, loaded with fat strips of white meat, peppery matzo balls, and dense kreplach. “Our clientele was dying off . . . it was all old people. So we refurbished the restaurant to a great extent, to make it more modern. If you don’t entice your younger customer you won’t have a customer. Sure, it irked some of the old regulars, who said, ‘Vhy did you do this? It was nice as it was,’ but now they say it’s better, and none of them have left.”

  Tillman had recently brought in a chef from the legendary Ivy restaurant, just to ensure the kitchen was staying faithful to tradition. The gefilte fish balls were perfectly round spheres, fried to a dark, crisp brown, which puffed out steam when bit into, revealing loosely chopped whitefish and garlicky mashed potato. A plate of sliced pickles, ranging from green to sweet and sour to old dills (which they call a heimeshe pickle), were arranged like a vertical tasting of wines. Hand-cut tongue, soft and gooey, was sublime, while the latke was airy and piping hot. And naturally, the salt beef sandwich was wonderful. Hand-carved by Nick, Harry Morgan’s counterman for three decades, it was streaked with just enough soft fat to bless each bite.

  Why couldn’t the rest of Britain learn to love this? Tillman didn’t think that it would ever become as popular as it had in the United States, but he clearly had proved that deli could appeal outside of London’s Jewish community. In deli, Tillman saw something that Britain needed, which no other restaurant could deliver.

  “Deli is great because you’ll get George Michael or Minnie Driver coming in here, but also regular people,” he said. “One day we had Roman Abramovich in here [the Russian Jewish oligarch and the world’s fifteenth-wealthiest man]. He was sitting at a table, with two bodyguards nearby and two outside. At the opposite table were two people who probably couldn’t string two pounds together, and they had no idea who he was . . . I don’t think you’ll find that mix of people anywhere else in London.”

  In the ultimate class-based society, Jewish deli turned out to be the great equalizer. Despite the efforts of London’s Jewish aristocracy to anglicize Yiddish culture, the proletarian charms of a hot salt beef sandwich united Britain in the end.

  The Fine Art of Jewish Delicatessen in Belgium and Paris

  “Do you have something like pastrami?” the American Jewish community representative loudly asked Nadia Benisti. “You know, something more like traditional deli?” The gentleman, who proudly boasted that he was a big shot in Cleveland’s fundraising circles, was visibly confused. His Belgian counterparts had told him they’d be lunching at Brussels’ finest Jewish delicatessen. After a long day of meetings, this man was deeply looking forward to a corned beef sandwich piled to the ceiling . . . just the sort of thing he’d eat at Jack’s. He wanted to sit and kibitz, rub elbows in a little schmutz, and loosen his tie for the first time since he’d arrived in Europe’s bureaucratic capital.

  Instead, he found himself in an opulently restored room, with turn of the century frescoes. Lounge music played softly over delicate conversations between stylish Orthodox businesspeople. People sat on Philippe Starck’s iconic Louis Ghost Chairs and ate off linens. I saw his face and sensed what he was thinking: “They’ve got it all wrong. These Euros don’t know what a deli is supposed to be like!”

  When I walked into Chez Gilles, with its air of continental civility and displays of neatly prepared gourmet foods, I initially thought the same. The owner, Nadia Benisti, an elegant woman who ran the place with her husband, Gilles, brought my friend Christopher Farber and me a warm basket of pletzl (onion roll) and a small plate of sliced broust, also referred to as smoked pastrami. The portions were small, immaculately presented, and resembled only faintly the deli back home. But as we began smearing whole-grain mustard on pieces of warm pletzl and applying the meat, our apprehension evaporated into exclamations of pleasure. Smoked by Gilles Benisti himself, the meat was shaved transparent. It tasted of peppery roast beef with a subtle hint of applewood. There was no dripping grease, no salt rush to the brain; just the regal interplay of fluffy bread, wine-scented mustard, and cool meat. It was upscale, refined, and utterly gastronomic. I’d entered the age of European deli enlightenment.

  Sweet, decadent Europe. Luxurious, fashionable, handcrafted land of five-week vacations, small cars, and intellectual snobbery. Historically obsessed on one side, cutting edge on the other, the Continent beckons with its gilded finery. It is a place in love with American and Jewish culture and yet a land where anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism flourish. For eaters, Europe offers the opposite of the North American diet: food carefully produced using timeless, traditional methods, in small, very rich portions. Through this gourmet filter, the Jewish delicatessen has emerged in Europe as a high-end version of its North American cousin.

  The day after that initial meal at Gilles, my friend Chris and I took the train to Hoffy’s, a wood-paneled glatt kosher delicatessen in Antwerp’s Hasidic diamond district. The halogen lights were dim, and the tables were dressed with fresh linen napkins and polished silverware. Moishe Hoffman came over to greet us with pickles, a basket of fresh challah rolls, and a plate of artfully arranged meats spread out like the petals of a flower—an asparagus tip and a single fanned strawberry resting atop a small bulb of chopped liver. Were I at a delicatessen in Long Island and a strawberry appeared on my plate of meat, I’d surely walk out. Here it seemed rather tasteful.

  Hoffman, a soft-spoken man with wire-framed spectacles, a thick black beard, and a warm, Yiddish-inflected Flemish accent, treated his dishes as precious gems. His father was a fishmonger from a shtetl in Hungary, and after the war he opened a fish shop in Antwerp. When Moishe Hoffman opened Hoffy’s in 1986 as a small takeout delicatessen, his father warned him, “You
either do it properly or not at all.” So Hoffman went to a top culinary school where he adapted classical recipes with kosher ingredients and reopened the renovated Hoffy’s, which he ran with his brothers.

  The fruits of Hoffman’s labor were apparent on that initial plate. Bursting with enough garlic to wipe out Transylvania, the crunchy pickles made North American “full sours” seem like those flimsy things on McDonald’s burgers. The meats, each one exceedingly tender and trimmed lean, were nonetheless moist and delicate, the highlight being the veal, which was a creamy pink and tasted almost sweet. Chris and I savored each lithe slice, rolling the flavors around on our tongues. Eating deli in this way—slowly, carefully, contemplatively—felt like rediscovering the love of your life halfway through a neglected marriage.

  Often, Hoffman would receive requests from visiting Americans for New York–style deli sandwiches. A few years back he thought it would be a good idea to feature them at Hoffy’s. So he created towering sandwiches loaded with pastrami, coleslaw, mustard, and other fillings similar to what he’d tasted in the United States. They didn’t take off. “People didn’t want to eat so much,” Hoffman said. “Imagine that I had a hundred or a hundred and twenty people eating here in a day. I didn’t sell but ten of them.”

  Hoffman really loved serving gentile Belgian customers, who came from all over the country to experience Jewish cooking. When two plump, ruddy-faced women walked in, Hoffman greeted them warmly in Flemish, took them through a tour of the dishes in the display case, and sat them down. Walking behind the counter, he grabbed a large plate and began scooping, shaping, and slicing a whole variety of tapas-sized portions. When he finished, Hoffman held up what looked like a gourmet Seder plate.

  “For these women I don’t even let them look at the menu,” he said, beaming with pride. “See? We have all the major Jewish foods represented here.” Packed on the plate were two-bite portions of apple kugel, gefilte fish, vegetarian pâté, a miniature cabbage roll, chopped liver, pastrami, and spicy eggplant salad. “I’ll go over now and explain to them what this is and I promise you the next time they will come back with six people.”

  Hoffy’s business increasingly relied on gentile clients to supplement Antwerp’s shrinking Jewish population. Since the 1970s, Jain Indians had established themselves as low-cost players in the diamond industry, moving much of it overseas. This, combined with an increasing atmosphere of anti-Semitism in Belgium from both immigrant Muslims and white supremacist groups, caused many of Antwerp’s Jews to move to Israel or the United States. Hoffy’s was one of the few kosher restaurants remaining in Antwerp, and Moishe Hoffman knew that his future was up in the air. Across Europe, the situation was similar, though nowhere was it more dramatic, or visible, than in Paris, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community.

  The only time I had spent in France was when I was nine. Between museums, my family packed in a quick visit to Jo Goldenberg’s deli and restaurant. My parents explained that it was a deli, like Yitz’s, but I couldn’t see any resemblance. Goldenberg’s was creepier, with worn wood and miserable waiters. The only things I recall about the meal were the terrific matzo ball soup and the rat that scurried overhead. Nearly two decades later my parents were in Paris, but when they got to Jo Goldenberg’s the grates were pulled over the windows of an empty deli. Jo Goldenberg’s had apparently closed for renovations toward the end of 2005 and never reopened.

  The Franco-Jewish story closely mirrors that of Jews throughout Europe, with communities settling and establishing themselves under protection from friendly monarchs (such as Charlemagne), until being massacred by the next ruler who came to power (Philip Augustus). French Jews were expelled from the kingdom in 1182, recalled in 1198, exiled in 1306, brought back in 1315, and kicked out again in 1394. In the early thirteenth century, the Jews of Paris, banned from the city, settled in a swampy area called Le Marais just outside Paris’s walls. It was only with the ascension of Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor in 1804 that French Jews became full citizens.

  Le Marais was resettled in large numbers from the 1880s onward, as Jews fled persecution by the Russian empire. Poor and unwelcome in the cultured society of established French Jewry, they crammed into tenements, recreating an urbanized version of shtetl life in the heart of Paris. At the center of this was a short, narrow street, the Rue des Rosiers. By the 1930s, the area was home to twenty thousand Jews, concentrated into several square blocks. When the Nazis invaded France, and the collaborative Vichy government began deporting Jews to the concentration camps, Le Marais was hit particularly hard. Of all of France’s Jewish communities, Le Marais suffered the highest losses during the Holocaust. After the war, refugees began to trickle back into Le Marais, joined by a large population of Sephardic Jews expelled from Arab colonies following the creation of Israel. They brought to the Rue des Rosiers their own traditions and foods.

  Jo Goldenberg’s had been founded as a kosher butcher shop in the 1920s by an immigrant from Russia. His sons, Joseph and Albert, opened the restaurant later on, and though the Nazis murdered most of the family, the deli’s owners survived. Goldenberg’s went on to become the best-known Jewish restaurant in Europe, serving French interpretations of Ashkenazi dishes in a bustling atmosphere. In August 1982, terrorists led by the notorious Palestinian Abu Nidal attacked Jo Goldenberg’s with machine guns and grenades, killing six customers and wounding dozens. After the attack, Goldenberg’s became a gathering spot for defiant Holocaust survivors. But it was neither Nazis nor terrorists that put an end to Jo Goldenberg’s. In the end, Paris’s best-known deli went out of business from a host of reasons not too dissimilar from those plaguing New York delis.

  Over the past decade, the Rue des Rosiers and Le Marais have become a haven for much of Paris’s fashionable gay community. Synagogues now sit next to the most coveted boutiques in France. Rents have shot up, as bourgeois bohemians and foreign millionaires scooped up apartments along the charming Rue des Rosiers. The street, which stretches several short blocks, exists as a bright, bustling, cross-section of Jewish life, where Israeli falafel vendors and Hasidic barbers (whose signs say “The Moschiach is coming, so you’d better look good”) mix with Jewish-themed book stores, art galleries, jewelers, bakeries, butchers, and delicatessens. It’s as though the whole of the Jewish world has been buffed and polished with a dreamy Chagall aesthetic.

  For lovers of Jewish food, the shops along the Rue des Rosiers are a dream. At the Murciano bakery, the gilt-edged marble shelves are equally split between Ashkenazi treats, like velvety squares of light cheesecake, and Sephardic specialties, such as rosewater-flavored Cornes de Gazelle. Panzer Dimitri (a distant relative of my friend Lorne Pancer) most resembles a North American—style deli, with bright white tiles throughout and barrels of dill pickles by the door. Down the road, the Ukrainian and Russian women inside Sacha Finkelsztajn, “la boutique jaune,” pile fillings on the French equivalent of deli sandwiches: slim slices of pastrami, tongue, or pickelfleish (corned beef), on a warm pletzl, topped with chopped eggplant caviar, roasted red pepper salad, half sour pickle slivers, ruby tomato slices, and hot Dijon mustard.

  I had gone to Paris after Belgium with Chris, where we’d met up with my old friend Daniel Steinberg. I’d wanted to find out more about the story behind Jo Goldenberg’s, but the family was uncooperative, and after exhausting my leads, I found myself somewhat lost. Not sure what to do next, I wandered across the cobblestones of Rue des Ecouffes and when I looked up, the most beautiful sight greeted my eyes from behind a storefront window. Sausages and salami of every shape and size were illuminated as though they were sculptures in the Louvre. Some were big as baseball bats, covered in chalky white mold, while others were studded with checkered patterns from the webbing that held them. There were linked salamis in huge clusters, fat as potatoes, and giant torpedoes of meat over a meter long. I’d seen sausages like this back home, in Italian and German delicatessens, but never in a Jewish deli. To me, the options for Jewish sausage were processed
salamis, hot dogs, and Montreal’s karnatzel. Then, I stepped back and read the script on the glass . . . Maison David . . . David’s House.

  In the few feet Chris, Daniel, and I could stand between stocked shelves and the cool glass of the display case, our eyes struggled to take it all in. Meats of every description hung from hooks on the ceiling or waited behind the refrigerated glass in neat little trays. A fashionable woman was busy ordering from the proprietor, a man wearing a white butcher’s jacket, with a thick black mustache and eyebrows that rose and fell as he spoke, betraying expressions on his shiny bald forehead.

  “Ahh madame,” he said in flirtatious French, “if you only knew the joy I could bring you and your family with an entrecote,” and with that proffered a gorgeous piece of dark aged beef for her inspection. Each time the lady seemed to be ready to conclude, the butcher’s eyebrows would ascend his forehead while his mouth opened and inhaled quickly, as if he’d just solved a great mystery. Then he’d dart into the back of his tiny shop, emerging with something else for her feast. One time he came out rocking a duck stripped down to its pink flesh. “Look at this beautiful baby,” he said, practically cooing. The Madame laughed, ordering until she’d spent four hundred euros. Within seconds of her leaving, the butcher laid down three transparent slices of creamy-colored cold cuts on the glass top of his counter and gestured with his hands to taste.

  “What is it?” I asked him in grade school French, but the merry butcher of Le Marais just zipped his fingers underneath his mustache and smiled surreptitiously.

  “Allez,” he said, eyebrows gesturing for us to taste.

  We laid the meats down on our tongues and savored the familiar texture of roast turkey or chicken, only more complex—fattier, richer, with a stronger flavor.