My mom’s maiden name was Judith Harmatz, no middle name, and she was raised in Brooklyn by Jacob Harmatz and his wife, Fanny. Fanny’s maiden name was Cohen. Jacob’s original family name can be traced back to his father, my great-great-grandfather, Yudi Charmatz, spelled with a C in front of it back then. With a name like Yudi Charmatz, your choices are fairly limited: you can be the bearded patriarch of an extended Jewish clan or you can be a George Lucas character and hang at an intergalactic bar with Kylo Ren, Maz Kanata, and Unkar Plutt, who I’m sure will turn out to be a distant cousin.
I knew my grandfather Jake and loved him; to me he was always Gramps. He was a remarkable man who came to America from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, until recently, I thought was just the name of a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I never met my maternal grandmother; she was sick for quite a few years and died when my mom was twenty-three. All I really know about Granny Fanny, as I desperately wish I’d been able to call her, is that she was a good cook and a strict disciplinarian, capable of terrifying anyone who came in contact with her.
Jacob and Fanny had five other children, in addition to my mom. In descending order, they were Natalie (born in 1908); Lillian (1910); Hymen (1912), sometimes called Harold (a far better choice) and more often called Hy; Belle (1914); and Theodore Jerome (1924), whom most people called Ted and the sisters all called Sonny. I came to know all of my maternal aunts and uncles, and responded to them with varying degrees of affection, respect, or disdain.
The most crucial element of the Harmatz family lore is that, according to my mom, Granny Fanny was a wonderful cook. After that, the lore gets a bit murky. The most accurate account seems to be that in 1905, my grandfather Jacob and his one brother, Herman, put up 150 of their hard-earned dollars to open a restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan called Harmatz’s. There were three tables in the restaurant. A cup of coffee was three cents and a plate of mushrooms, which seems to have been their signature dish, cost eight cents. When business improved, Jacob, who was more interested in food than Herman, introduced salads and other fresh vegetables to the limited menu.
Gramps and Granny Fanny as young marrieds. She doesn’t look too terrifying. But looks can be deceiving. Maybe she has a rolling pin hidden behind her back.
While the pennies were piling up at Harmatz’s, one of Gramps’s sisters, Annie, and her husband, Alex Ratner, had been living in Texas. While there, Alex was in an automobile accident and was awarded some money. He used his newfound windfall to yank Annie back to New York, and in 1907, Grandpa Jake, Herman, and Alex decided to open a new and larger restaurant on Second Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets called Ratner’s. One family legend has it that a coin flip determined the eatery’s name. Another is that Alex’s last name was the easier one to pronounce. Either way, however, I feel duty-bound to say that neither Ratner’s nor Harmatz’s were what one might call welcoming choices for what I assume they all hoped would one day become an A-list restaurant.
Soon after Ratner’s opened, Alex developed tuberculosis, so he and Annie moved to California. Annie persuaded her brother Jake to move west with them, and he did, but he soon made the surprising discovery that, just like everywhere else, it required money to live in Los Angeles and they had all run out of the stuff. Jake, being the one with the business sense, returned to New York to build up a nest egg. The Ratner’s on Second Avenue was now being run by a cousin, Abe, so Jake became partners with two brothers, Alex and Luis Zankel, and in 1917 they opened up a second Ratner’s, this one at 138 Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. For a good many decades, having two Ratner’s was a constant source of confusion to anyone looking for a good onion roll and a nice piece fish. Although the food at the Second Avenue Ratner’s was never as good as Jake’s version, Abe’s restaurant became a much hipper restaurant for a while when its location turned into the East Village in the 1950s. Actors in the burgeoning television business and who worked in off-Broadway theaters began flocking there. And in the early and mid-’60s, Bill Graham and Jerry Garcia and Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix and other rock-and-rolling denizens of the nearby Fillmore East were hanging out eating rugelach and pickled herring at Ratner’s Second Avenue. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around any member of Iron Butterfly scarfing down some latkes after a hard night of “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida”ing.
My grandfather’s original tiny restaurant was on Pitt Street on the Lower East Side, which, in those days, was crammed with Jewish and Italian immigrants. It was as close to the Old World Polish, Russian, and Austrian shtetls as could be re-created in the New World. Because the Old Worlders were streaming into the country at a wildly rapid rate, a lot of restaurants sprang up in that neighborhood, all promising quality food at reasonable prices. Harmatz’s and later the Delancey Street Ratner’s began as—and remained until its final day—a vegetarian-dairy restaurant. No meat whatsoever, although eventually Ratner’s did serve fish. That choice, much like the ancient Hebrew dietary laws, came about out of a commitment to safety, cleanliness, and expediency. With no refrigeration and lacking fairly basic sanitary conditions, many of the restaurants that relied on meat products were soon forced to close shop. Dairy restaurants proved easier to keep clean, an essential trait fueling their growth in popularity. The food at the Delancey Street Ratner’s began with traditional (and very simple) meals such as soups, kasha varnishkes, and various delicious potato concoctions that, in addition to being superb side dishes, were heavy enough to use as an anchor for any boat that docked nearby. But Gramps knew that tastes would change and evolve. He also knew the kind of delicious food that Granny Fanny could make and, although she never cooked at the restaurant, he made sure her recipes were mimicked. Vegetarian-dairy gradually changed from a description to an acknowledged genre of cuisine. Granted, even by the time I came on the scene and was old enough to gorge myself on Ratner’s potato pancakes and potato pierogis and blueberry blintzes, you could feel your arteries actually begin to harden right at the table before your meal was even finished. But a cuisine it was.
The Ratner’s at 138 Delancey Street, where it remained for eighty-five years, was a huge success. When it closed in 2002, it was the longest continuously run family-owned restaurant in New York City.
Ratner’s in its prime on Delancey Street
In the 1920s and ’30s Ratner’s became the haunt of celebrities like Al Jolson, the Ritz Brothers, and Fanny Brice, as well as some pretty well-known gangsters. Word is that these tough guys were quite rowdy but that Grandpa Jake kept them in line. My gramps must have been a fairly tough guy himself because Ratner’s thrived and he was never tossed in the East River with a pair of cement gefilte fishes tied to his feet. Some of those kreplach-eating hoods made big names for themselves. There was Louis “Lepke” Buchalter; Benjamin “Dopey Benny” Fein (one of my aunts told me his nickname when I was a kid and he instantly became my favorite gangster of all time); Meyer Lansky (if you Google “Ratner’s restaurant photos,” a picture of Meyer Lansky pops up with the caption “Ratner’s Cheese Blintzes—Meyer Lansky’s Favorite Food); William Lipshitz (I liked him, too, because as a nine-year-old it was very hard to imagine a tough guy whose last name was Lipshitz); Abe “Kid Twist” Reles (I loved him because he was fictionalized and played by Peter Falk in the movie Murder, Inc.); Arnold Rothstein (who supposedly fixed the 1919 World Series); Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer; and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.
I romanticized Siegel, not just because he founded Las Vegas but because one of his best friends was my uncle Spatzi, who was married to my aunt Natalie. His last name was Spatz. I don’t actually have any idea what his real first name was because until he died, when I was around ten, I only called him Uncle Spatzi and never heard anyone ever call him anything but Spatzi. He was an ex-cop turned private detective and he reminded me of William Demarest, the actor who used to play a lot of thugs and wisecracking reporters in 1930s movies. It broke my heart when I heard that Bugsy Siegel had asked Spatzi t
o come to Vegas with him but my uncle turned him down because he didn’t want to get involved with the mob. I’m still a tad bitter about this decision because I love Las Vegas and I think I would have made an excellent mobster. Petey “Muscle Boy” Gethers. Or, more likely, Petey “Grammar Boy” Gethers. On reflection, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t grow up explaining to guys with names like “Killer” Klein and Chaim “The Hitter” Shmulowitz about the proper usage of “me” and “I” or trying to get them to stop putting apostrophes in the wrong places.
Ratner’s on Delancey continued to be a celebrity haunt way beyond those early days. It eventually stayed open twenty-four hours a day and became the lunch and dinner destination for a lot of show business luminaries, the must-stop place for politicians seeking the Jewish vote and a late-night delight for stoners who craved some strawberry cheesecake at three a.m. At any given time, from the 1950s on, you’d see Dennis Hopper, Groucho Marx, Dick Gregory, Walter Matthau, Elia Kazan, or Zero Mostel dining at an adjoining table to Nelson Rockefeller, Bobby Kennedy, John Lindsay, Robert Wagner (the mayor of New York City, not the star of Hart to Hart), Ed Koch, or David Dinkins. The restaurant’s most famous movie moment came when it was used as an establishing shot in the beginning of The French Connection—for those in the know, it immediately set the film’s locale as the somewhat seedy and run-down Lower East Side of the late ’60s/early ’70s. More recently, in season five, episode four, of Mad Men, a lunch scene was set in Ratner’s, solidifying the restaurant’s claim as one of Manhattan’s great historical sites of that era.
Meyer Lansky. Ratner’s Cheese Blintzes were his favorite food.
As a boy, it never ceased to amaze me that my family could go to a restaurant, eat to our collective hearts’ content, and then stroll out without paying a dime. Not only were our meals free in the dining room, as we left my gramps would make sure that, from the take-out counter, we were loaded up with delicacies, all of them crammed into flimsy white cardboard boxes with the red Ratner’s logo on top, barely held closed by thin white string straining to burst. I’ve never had food quite like what was served at Ratner’s. For one thing, there were the incredible onion rolls, miraculously warm and always sitting in a red plastic basket as one sat down to dine. Those rolls were free not just to descendants and relatives of Jacob Harmatz but to everyone who sat at one of the tables, which were set with no-frills white tablecloths and white cloth napkins that were large enough and heavy enough to double as hospital bandages.
Ratner’s Onion Rolls. In a much more attractive setting than their natural habit.
For breakfast, you could get matzo brei (my favorite as well as my mother’s, and you could get it scrambled or pancake style), lox, eggs, and onions (also scrambled or pancake style; I got everything pancake style), or a baked spinach soufflé topped with a fried egg and a side of potato pancakes cut into strips like French fries. Other standouts on the menu were potato and onion pierogis, gefilte fish (a scary, gelatinous blob of cold fish that was somehow delicious when served with take-your-head-off-spicy-hot red horseradish), and blueberry, cherry, and plain cheese blintzes. Or you could just settle for a bagel or bialy loaded with cream cheese and what seemed like an Everest-size mound of thick lox and sliced raw onion, tomato, and cucumber.
For lunch and dinner, you could start with sweet, cold borscht topped with sour cream, or vegetarian chopped liver (it sounds horrible but was incredibly delicious, especially when slathered on an onion roll or a slice of homemade challah), and follow it with grilled fish served on sizzling platters in the shape of a fish along with a side of stewed mushrooms or barley and onions. There was thick, heavy, Jewish cheesecake (way different from the creamy Italian cheesecake) and Dr. Brown’s cream and black cherry sodas, which I was only allowed to have in the restaurant, never at home (my mom was one of the earliest anti-sugar people on the planet).
When I wasn’t stuffing my face, I was allowed to sit behind the cash register with one of my aunts and push buttons and ring up payments and give change (well, technically, I gave dollars; coins were dispersed through a magical little gizmo that was like a curved slide coming out of the cash register). I could also go into the kitchen; I loved pushing my way through the western-saloon-like swinging doors with diamond-shaped windows carved into the middle. There I could watch sweaty cooks working amid the stainless steel shelves and equipment, churning out all of the restaurant’s specialties on stoves that seemed as hot and dangerous as the sun. I could even go behind the cake counter at the front of the store and help out the harried employees who were trying to box up macaroons, cheese or cherry Danish, an amazing strawberry shortcake, bagels and bialys and other doughy treats fast enough to satisfy the hordes of frantic customers tearing off numbered tickets from a metal dispenser and waving them in the air so they could be waited on next. The action was not unlike what goes on at the commodities market except that we were basically dealing in cholesterol rather than corn futures. It occurs to me now that one of the reasons the staff behind the counter may have been so harried is that they had to let a seven-year-old boy “help” them make their sales.
The Ratner’s Menu
My grandfather was an extraordinarily generous man. No relative of his ever paid a penny once they passed through the heavy glass doors of Ratner’s. My mother tells stories of how he would make up excuses, some pretty far-fetched—he found money on the street or someone paid him a loan he didn’t remember loaning—as a reason to pass much-needed cash along to my parents in the early days of their marriage. She once showed me a note he wrote to her, into which he had tucked some money—according to the note it was extra cash that had accidentally found its way into his pocket. Gramps’s English was excellent but, probably because he was a native Yiddish and German speaker, he couldn’t spell. He never learned to spell his daughter’s name properly; the letter she showed me began: “Dear Judit.”
Some of his efforts to disguise his generosity bordered on the extraordinary. When my parents were still struggling newlyweds and living in Manhattan, my mother’s sister Belle told her about an incredible butcher she’d discovered in Brooklyn. His prices were unbelievably cheap—a third of the price of any other butcher. So every couple of weeks, my parents would give Belle money and Belle would go to this magical store near her house and then pass along steaks, chops, ground beef, you name it—top quality at an insanely low cost. This went on for a year. Then, one day, my parents’ friend and neighbor, Teri, said she wanted to get in on this amazing deal. My mom went to Belle, advocating for Teri, and the truth emerged about the too-good-to-be-true cleaver wielder. There was no low-priced butcher. There was only a normal-priced butcher—but my mother’s father had been paying the difference in cost. Rather than making my mom and dad feel as if they were charity cases, he’d created this elaborate ruse to make sure they ate well. My gramps, Jake, was all about dignity and generosity.
Jacob Harmatz attended my bar mitzvah and tried to bribe me with money beyond my wildest dreams ($1,000!) to continue with my Hebrew studies. I stayed true to my young-but-already-nonspiritual self, politely rejecting his financial overture. Then I kissed him on his wonderfully stubbly cheek and cried profusely when he died three months after my thirteenth birthday.
As often happens when a strong patriarch takes his leave, the family dynamic changed quite a bit—and it changed quickly. Of the many unfair things in life, one of the most unfair is that while physical traits are often passed along to descendants—baldness, gum disease, high blood pressure, and the occasional high cheekbone and strong jaw line—moral and ethical traits do not seem to be genetically linked to one’s heritage. Honesty, courage, altruism, and decency all too rarely make it from one generation to the next.
My mother never worked in the restaurant—or “the store,” as my relatives all referred to Ratner’s—but three of her four older siblings did. Her brother Hy ran the place and, after my grandfather died, Hy owned it. Or, rather, controlled it—and everything else from
Jake’s estate. My grandfather was not only an unselfish and decent man, he was a trusting one, with a nineteenth-century view of how families worked.
Although his other four children (the baby of the family, Ted, had been killed in a plane crash a couple of years before) shared equally in the estate, Hy was given the overriding power to dispose of that estate as he saw fit—including giving loans to himself and deciding what money to hold on to and what to pay out to everyone else—and when to pay it out. Jake was certain that his only remaining son would provide generously for his siblings and their own families. The flaw in my grandfather’s thinking centered around everyone’s dependence on Hy’s generosity, a concept that was completely foreign to my uncle. His idea of sharing and playing well with others was to give everything, including the restaurant, to his two sons, put my aunts (his sisters) on a relatively small salary for their work at the store, almost completely ignore (i.e., screw) Ted’s surviving family members, and pretend that my parents really weren’t part of the family from a financial perspective because they didn’t join him walking the hard floor from table to table or punching the buttons of the adding machine in the backroom office at the restaurant.
Over the next three decades, Hy and his two sons ran the restaurant into the ground, due to a combination of sheer greed (they cared far more about the value of the real estate that came with the restaurant than the essence and reputation of the place itself) and a total lack of interest in and knowledge about the quality of the food that Ratner’s served—neither of those being great traits when overseeing a revered restaurant. They damaged the brand by going into the frozen food business and pushing a high-profit/extremely low quality product. They had tunnel vision and refused to expand—a Ratner’s in Miami or Los Angeles, for instance, would have been a gold mine, never mind a Ratner’s a mere four miles away on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Belle’s two children, who were actually interested in food and had good taste, wanted to open an uptown take-out-only Ratner’s, but my uncle refused to cut them into the business in any kind of meaningful way. If you weren’t immediate family—his immediate family—my uncle’s view was that you weren’t really family.
My Mother's Kitchen Page 3