Save the Deli

by David Sax

  Jeremy took me downstairs, into the cramped prep kitchen, where bags of potatoes and onions seemed to fill every available space. “I still have a few weeks until my commissary is ready,” he said, “so until then we’re crammed in.” Jeremy opened one of the small walk-in refrigerators and showed me the crown jewels: wrapped Empire National pastramis, and large metal vats where Empire National’s corned beef pickled further in the 2nd Ave Deli’s special brine.

  “Do you know what this is?” Jeremy asked, holding out a metal tray.

  “Is it p’tcha?” I asked, seeing the elusive dish for the first time since France.

  “Ahh,” said Kathy, a slim veteran waitress from the old delicatessen, eyeing the p’tcha as we returned upstairs. “So this is the famous garlic Jell-O.”

  When the original 2nd Ave Deli closed down, all of the deli’s employees drifted to jobs at various delicatessens around New York. What was amazing about the 2nd Ave Deli’s reopening was how many of the original staff had returned. Managers Steve Cohen and Tony Sze came back. Four of the old waitresses, including Faye and Linda, did too, though Ida Berger and Diane Kassner did not. One new waiter had owned a kosher deli in Queens while another had been a trader at Goldman Sachs. Several of the cooks were back in the kitchen, and only three countermen were missing out of a dozen.

  Mohamed, a young-looking Egyptian counterman with a goatee, had returned to his native Cairo and opened a falafel shop when the deli closed. But when he heard that the 2nd Ave Deli would be reopening, he called Jack Lebewohl. “I never feel like I’m working for a boss here,” he told me, explaining why he’d left Egypt to return to the Jewish delicatessen trade. “I’ve had the same customers for twelve years. They are hugging us like they are happy to see us.” The other countermen on that night—Louie, David, and Mahmoud—all felt the same way. The 2nd Ave Deli was family.

  Jeremy and I split a square of p’tcha, which was lemony yellow in color. Chunky, with a bubbly, almost champagne consistency, fat hunks of garlic, eggs, and flakes of flesh greeted my mouth as I watched Jeremy inhale his piece. When Jeremy Lebewohl was a kid, he would hang around the deli with his uncle Abe and eat anything that was put in front of him. One time, Abe wanted to introduce bull’s testicles to the menu after tasting them in Israel, and for a week young Jeremy ate bull’s balls.

  “David?” Jack asked, appearing above me at the bar. “Have you tried the g’fish?” The what? “The g’fish . . . the gefilte fish? Can I tell you something?” he asked. “This g’fish here is the best I’ve ever had. It’s even better than we had on 10th Street, and it’s the same cook!” Jack went behind the deli counter and came back with half an oval of gefilte fish. “It’s so good,” he proclaimed, “you don’t even need horseradish.” Flecked with grated bits of carrots, it was the color of oatmeal. A fountain of juice spurted in my mouth. It was like eating freshly steamed whitefish, each bite surging with the torrent of the stream the fish had swum in. I’d never tasted gefilte fish so full of life before.

  “Here, you’re not just eating deli,” Jack said, as he passed me silky-smooth chopped liver spread on rye. “How many places make gefilte fish today? What restaurant makes p’tcha? No one even eats it, and we won’t make any money off it, but that’s what makes the 2nd Ave Deli.” The new 2nd Ave Deli, like the old one, was going to be a cultural center for Yiddish cooking. Jeremy Lebewohl, just twenty-five years old, was already committed to expanding the traditional items the deli offered. On each table, the waiter deposited a small dish of gribenes, which are bits of chicken skin, fried to a golden crisp. Jeremy called them “Jewish popcorn.” Sprinkled over the chopped liver, they gave off a greasy crackle that was like a kosher pork rind.

  As I took my seat for dinner, I beheld a cross-section of familiar faces. Sitting at my table was Ted Merwin, the Jewish studies professor and my fellow deli historian, plus my cousins Stephen Lack, a veteran Lower Manhattan artist, and his son Asher, an East Village musician. Across the aisle from us, the comedic actor Robert Wuhl shared meatloaf with Drew Nieporent, the powerful restaurateur behind Nobu. Sitting right behind me were Karen and Eddie Weinberg, the owners of Brooklyn’s Empire National. When we last spoke, Eddie had been resigned to the death of the industry, having lost his largest account when the 2nd Ave Deli closed. But tonight the meat merchant with the muscular physique of a bull had a smile that dynamite couldn’t have chipped away.

  “It’s great to have them back,” Weinberg told me, as he folded slices of his own dark, burgundy pastrami onto rye bread. “It’s great for the whole industry . . . a little optimism. This carries weight. I’m hoping they’re going to be a great success and being hand in hand we’ll be a great success together.”

  Why, I asked Eddie, did this one deli’s reopening make any difference? I mean, delis closed and opened all the time in New York, and the 2nd Ave Deli was by no means the first to rise a second time. “Yeah? Well, the Yankees create more interest than the Kansas City Royals do, but they’re both just baseball teams, right?” he said. “Listen, even other delis are happy about them opening. When a place like this is missing, it weakens the rest of them, makes them feel less significant.”

  Each time the waiter slowly poured out the chicken soup from a metal dish into a ceramic bowl, the faces around the cozy room would light up. Then they would take their first hunk out of the baseball-sized dumpling, soak up the rich, golden liquid, inhale for one rewarding second, and bring themselves right back to the corner of 10th Street and Second Avenue. The matzo ball was the perfect density; you could hold it on your tongue and it would stay intact, but if you applied just enough pressure it would fall apart. The soup itself was another wonder—dilly, light, and completely clear.

  The corned beef was also sensational. The deli’s extra curing had somehow improved on Eddie Weinberg’s work, so that it was at the point of crumbling, but still dotted with veins of lubricating fat, with a sweet aftertaste. The waiter brought us dessert—the most sensational rugelach I’d ever eaten. Each dense little cookie was bristling with cinnamon sugar. Finally, the meal concluded with a new touch of Jeremy Lebewohl’s: shot glasses of Bosco chocolate syrup with soda. It was a chocolate phosphate slider, and the sweet fizz of the bubbles was the deli’s answer to champagne.

  Each individual seemed absorbed in his own equivalent of Proust’s madeleine moment. The small room brimmed with joy . . . pure, unsullied, genuine joy. It was the type of euphoria you feel when your hometown team wins the championship, the type of intravenous happiness that makes you want to hug every single person around you, which I, and everyone else, pretty much did that night. As the evening wore on and the vodka appeared, stories and jokes began flowing freely. An old customer pulled out a crusty bottle of half-finished mustard from the original deli, which he’d been saving in his freezer for two years. Though he knew in his heart that the 2nd Ave Deli would somehow reopen, when his faith was in doubt, he’d pull out the jar, hold it tight, and pray.

  After the shock of the original deli’s closing faded, Jack and Jeremy Lebewohl began discussing the future. Jack loved the deli, but he took over because of Abe’s murder, and it was not the life he wanted to lead. Joshua, Jack’s oldest son, was starting his career as a lawyer, and none of Sharon Lebewohl’s children were interested. Jeremy was selling bagels wholesale, and so the torch of the deli was his. By the summer of 2006 he began looking at properties, and by the end of that year he and Joshua were the proud owners of 162 East 33rd Street. This time, rent wouldn’t force anyone out of business.

  I first heard about the deli’s reopening in January 2007, the very first day I began my journey across the United States. As the deli’s debut grew closer, Jeremy and I spoke regularly, mostly about the logistics of the business and when he hoped to open. First it was early October, then before Thanksgiving, then after Thanksgiving, until it finally came down to the week before Christmas. People rightly called it the hottest restaurant debut in New York that year, if not the decade, and the buzz was deaf
ening.

  Now we were sitting in Jeremy’s deli, at the end of his final preview dinner, on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath. Tomorrow he would rest, on Sunday the staff would train, but come Monday morning the doors would open at six, and they wouldn’t shut as long as Jeremy Lebewohl kept the 2nd Ave Deli in business.

  “My goal is to open up a classic deli,” Jeremy said. “I’m not a chef, but I can guarantee I’m a perfectionist.” Still, he knew that his was a different narrative from New York’s Deli Men of the past. Jeremy was young, was fairly wealthy, and had graduated from NYU. He dressed not in beaten white aprons, but in designer jeans. “I’ve never been a dishwasher. I’ve never worked my way up. People will hate me for it, but that’s who I am. It’s not the classic immigrant story, but I’m proud of my time and my generation.”

  Jeremy saw in his contemporaries a burning desire for something real, very much in line with the resurgent movement toward traditionally made, slowly prepared foods. Raised on chain restaurants and prepackaged products, young consumers wanted more than just another concept. They wanted food the way their parents remembered it, without shortcuts, and they were ready to pay for it. The food at the 2nd Ave Deli would be healthy in the sense that it was soulful, freshly cooked, and faithful.

  The 2nd Ave Deli brought a recognized brand and established customer base, but it also carried with it a tremendous burden. Expectations for the deli’s reopening were astronomical. As one longtime customer wrote me in an email:

  “Basically, everybody and their Aunt Tillie is waiting for the 2nd Ave Deli to reopen, and everyone has said the same thing to me. They are going to walk in, order their favorite thing and take ONE BITE. That’s all, just one. And if it is not how they remember it they are going to let out a blood-curdling scream and throw the money on the table and walk out. Never to return again.”

  In reopening the deli, Jeremy had placed himself in the shadow of Abe Lebewohl, possibly the most revered Deli Man of the twentieth century. How did Jeremy plan to meet those expectations? “Impossible. Impossible,” he replied emphatically, as the table raised shots to Abe’s memory. Abe was Abe. No one could fill those shoes. Jeremy would have to earn the respect of his customers. “My goal is to open the doors Monday morning and have the people who want me fail to say, ‘Hey, this is terrific!’”

  The original title of this book was The Death of Deli, and it was very much a swan song. Everywhere I looked delis were dying. Their numbers, which had been so high in the early twentieth century, had fallen steeply in almost every city I visited. This was as true in Chicago as it was in Paris, but nowhere was this more obvious than New York, a city that once boasted thousands of delis and now had a few dozen. The reasons were well established: a shift in Jewish demographics had replaced the close-knit traditional communities where delis thrived, as Jews moved out to assimilated and disparate suburbs; a change in eating habits, exacerbated by diet fads and shifting warnings about fat, carbs, salt, or meat, had demonized Jewish deli food; the changing landscape of the restaurant industry, with the economics firmly tilted on the side of large chains, made operating family-owned Jewish delicatessens nearly impossible. Everywhere I turned I saw delis closing, delis abandoning their Jewish roots, or delis selling out their very souls for a shot at corporate success. If things continued along this road, the Jewish delicatessen would soon be gone.

  I never intended to try to help save the deli; I honestly never thought it was possible. The phrase came about by chance, when I was trying to register domain names for a blog. Deli.com, delicatessen.com, jewishdeli.com, and pastrami.com were taken, but savethedeli.com was available. But the more I visited delis around the world, the greater my sense of hope that the Jewish deli could indeed be saved.

  I saw it in New York, in the camaraderie of the countermen at Katz’s, and in the late-night love affair between New Yorkers and their pastrami. I saw it in the tourist crowds at the Stage and Carnegie delis, where people came from all over the world to eat a gigantic sandwich. I tasted it in Brooklyn; at Gottlieb’s, a glatt kosher deli operated by Yiddish-speaking Hassidim; but also in the sweet potato knishes at Adelman’s, a kosher delicatessen on King’s Highway owned by Mohamed Salem, a devout Egyptian Muslim.

  I felt hope in Detroit, where Sy Ginsberg showed me there were people who would do almost anything to help delis, whether behind bulletproof glass in the inner city or at Zingerman’s, where sustainable thinking showed a new way forward. I saw it in Chicago, a city that had basically given deli up for dead and was now experiencing a downtown revival. I found hope along the road west, from fading traditionalists hanging on in Missouri to diehard New York deli owners in Denver. I tasted possibility at Jimmy and Drew’s 28th Street Deli in Boulder, which proved that great deli could happen anywhere. I witnessed it in San Francisco, in a gourmet deli movement by the Bay, and in Los Angeles, a city with the strongest delicatessen families anywhere.

  I saw hope for the deli in Las Vegas, not in the casinos, as many did, but in the local spot Weiss Bakery and Delicatessen, which served wholesome deli meals. I felt it in the new frontiers of Arizona, and in Texas, where a veteran New York Deli Man like Ziggy Gruber could sell a traditional, haymish delicatessen as though he were operating on the Lower East Side. I tasted it in New Orleans, where tough delis outlasted tough times, and yes, even in Florida, where the demise of delis at the hands of corporations did nothing to temper the love of the food among the state’s aging Jewish residents.

  I beheld deli at its purest in the uncompromising smoked meat sandwiches of Montreal. I beheld dignity in London’s well-manicured salt beef bars, in the gourmet meats at Antwerp’s Hoffy’s, and Michel Kalifa’s small Parisian delicatessen, an experience that opened my eyes to the limitless culinary possibilities of this food. Even in Poland, I witnessed traditional Jewish food rise up from the grave against all odds.

  Best of all, I finally witnessed salvation back home. In June 2008, a young Toronto cook named Zane Caplansky installed himself in the unused kitchen of a dank tavern downtown and began selling hand-cut smoked meat sandwiches. Inspired by Schwartz’s, Zane had cured raw briskets from scratch, smoking them over hardwood for ten whole hours, resulting in a heaven-sent blend of Montreal smoked meat and Texas BBQ brisket. Deli lovers all over Toronto emerged from hibernation, and within two days of opening, Caplansky’s Delicatessen had sold out of meat. Caplansky’s has been packed ever since. When the growing crowds have occasionally eaten through Caplansky’s entire supply of meat, Zane, ever the purist, simply closed shop for a day or two until his next batch of briskets have cured. Sure, he could order a replacement product or farm out his production to purveyors (he’s had countless offers), but his respect for deli’s purity is so strong that he’d rather turn away diners than cut corners. My hopes for deli’s preservation in Toronto were buoyed even further when, six months after telling me he was going to sell, Lorne Pancer, owner of Moe Pancer’s deli, had a change of heart. He took his grandfather’s delicatessen off the market and got back to slicing sandwiches. “How could I let anyone else own this?” he said with a smile, acknowledging that the negative reaction to the sale on my website was a factor in his decision. Between Pancer and Caplansky, Toronto’s legacy and its past were in good hands.

  What I saw, heard, and ate in these places represented a slight but significant shift in the history of the Jewish deli. A change was in the air. The delicatessen had come so close to death that even normally complacent people had finally taken notice. I had encountered a small, passionate group of people who were ready to stand up and fight for the very survival of the Jewish delicatessen. There was an appetite for a new type of Jewish delicatessen, one that blended the traditions of the past with the ideals of the present. This new breed of deli would come from a different generation of Deli Men unbound by age, sex, nationality, or even religion, but who possessed the fearlessness and creativity that could bring the Jewish delicatessen into the twenty-first century, while staying faithful to the flavors o
f the nineteenth. I encountered this in several places, but nowhere did I feel this more than at the reopening of the 2nd Ave Deli.

  At 9:00 a.m. on December 17, 2007, the perky hosts of the morning shows, wire services reporters, and newspaper photographers all filled the 2nd Ave Deli, descending on the few eager customers eating pastrami sandwiches for breakfast like they were celebrities. I sat down with Jack Lebewohl, who ordered me lox, eggs, and onions—a fluffy, plate-sized pancake filled with salty flakes of smoked fish.

  “Jeremy has a certain knack,” Jack said. “He got it from Abe. That’s why Abe had a special affinity for Jeremy. In many ways he’s just like my brother; his relationship with employees, the way he talks to vendors, his feel for the food. . . . The secret is that you’re willing to try something new, like the gribenes or chocolate soda, and if it doesn’t work you go back. It’s a certain kind of fearlessness. But Jeremy also has a certain intelligence to know how to reverse course.”

  At 11:00 a.m., the assembled press corps gathered outside for the official opening, and the 2nd Ave Deli’s sign was unveiled. Jack and his wife, Terry, Jeremy and Joshua Lebewohl, Steve Cohen, and a few other staff officially opened the deli by cutting a long string of small kosher salami links. Flashbulbs popped, a small cheer went up, and then everyone went back inside for lunch. At the deli’s rear table, I happened upon my friend Joshua Wolf Shenk. “I couldn’t be there when the Berlin Wall came down,” he said, “but this I wouldn’t miss.” Joshua had ordered a combination pastrami/corned beef sandwich. The thin slices of the pink corned beef and the dark red pastrami spilled over the crust of the rye bread, leaving a trail of meat scraps and peppercorns on the plate. He generously applied spicy brown mustard, shut his eyes, and bit in. “Ummmmpppphhhh!” His eyes rolled back into his skull, and he reclined into the vinyl. After ten seconds or so he swallowed, and opened his eyes, looking as though he’d emerged from a trance. “I really forgot how good it tastes,” Joshua said. He took another bite, closed his eyes, and nodded. Inside his brain, Joshua’s neurons were firing away in sharp sparkles, his grin verging on the post-coital. “This is fucking dynamite! Usually the anticipation is greater than the experience, but this is a fucking incredible meal!”