The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  By TARA BAHRAMPOUR | August 26, 2001

  LONG, LONG AGO, BEFORE TRENDY RESTAURants, realty agencies and kitsch shops occupied its storefronts, Orchard Street on the Lower East Side was known for something else. It was, as Irving Howe wrote in “World of Our Fathers,” his classic study of Jewish immigrant life, “pushcart territory,” a narrow lane teeming with vendors of “shawls, bananas, oilcloth, garlic, trousers, ill-favored fish, ready-to-wear spectacles.”

  Arguably the best known of these pushcarts wares was the pickle. And it is still a fixture in New York delis, where a half-sour spear is often wrapped up with each sandwich. But the briny, rough-skinned pickle that was once such an integral part of the city’s landscape is in danger of becoming a memory.

  A century ago, New York was home to 200 family-run pickle shops, half of them on the Lower East Side, where wholesale cucumbers were sold. Over the years, however, they dwindled.

  “When I came, there were five here,” said Alan Kaufman, who has worked at Guss’s Pickels on Essex Street since 1981. “This place is the last of the last.”

  Pickling has helped bring some people closer to their roots.

  Part of the problem is escalating rents. Another problem, Mr. Kaufman said, is that “kids today would rather be a doctor or a lawyer than a pickle man.”

  Enter the Pickle Savior. In a cramped office at New York University, Lucy Norris pored over a pile of recipes, handwritten books and family histories from around the world. She is working on a master’s degree in food studies. She comes from a pickling family.

  She says that pickling has helped bring some people closer to their roots. Ms. Norris mentioned a young woman she had met in an N.Y.U. preserving class.

  “She was this fast-paced New York chick—blond, long hair, dressed in black, never talked to her parents,” Ms. Norris recalled. But the class sparked hidden memories, and the next time the woman visited her family in New Jersey, she dug up an old five-gallon ceramic crock in which her grandfather used to pickle tomatoes.

  As Ms. Norris remembered it, the woman said, “All of a sudden everything that I had forgotten about my childhood all kind of flew back to me, and it just kind of slowed my life down completely.”

  Go, Eat, You Never Know

  By FRANK BRUNI | May 30, 2007

  THEY COME AROUND EVERY FEW YEARS, these rumors that Katz’s Delicatessen is about to close or move or somehow betray itself and those of us who care about it, and our response is always the same.

  We gasp. Then we listen for—and let ourselves be consoled by—the denials. And then our attention wanders, because there’s a part of us that doesn’t really believe Katz’s could ever crumble.

  It’s been around, after all, since 1888. That’s longer than Cindy Adams. It’s a strand of the city’s DNA, a bridge between past and present that’s no less a landmark than some bona fide architectural treasure. It’s immutable, isn’t it?

  Isn’t it?

  Of course not, and let’s come back to that—to a conversation, by turns reassuring and slightly worrisome, with one of the restaurant’s owners—in short order.

  But first let’s do something we don’t do often enough. Let’s take the occasion of the most recent rumors to pause and appreciate Katz’s. To take its measure in a format that grants it the kind of recognition typically reserved for restaurants more proper but no more deserving.

  To revel in its pastrami sandwich, one of the best in the land, with an eye-popping stack of brined beef that’s juicy, smoky, rapturous. To glory in the intricate ritual of the place: the taking of a ticket at the door; the lining-up in front of one of the servers who carves that beef by hand; the tasting of the thick, ridged slices the server gives us as the sandwich is being built; the nodding when we’re asked if we want pickles, because of course we want pickles.

  At Katz’s I prefer the pastrami, though I’m crazy, too, about the tongue, which is less commonly available these days than it should be, given the tenderness of the meat. Katz’s sells about 1,000 pastrami sandwiches a day, and there’s about a pound of meat, pre-trimming, per sandwich.

  Putting an Ageless Pleasure Between the Rye

  By ED LEVINE | April 30, 2003

  PASTRAMI IS DELI FOOD, AND DELI FOOD IS something New Yorkers have argued about—and loved—for as long as there have been delis in New York. It is a comfort to both Jew and non-Jew, male and female, black and white, Asian and Latino—to all New Yorkers, at least all those who relish the luscious, fatty pleasures of cured, smoked and steamed beef navel on rye. (We’ll start that diet on Monday.)

  But where did pastrami come from? And what constitutes real pastrami?

  Joan Nathan, author of “Jewish Cooking in America” (Knopf, 1998), says the word pastrami comes from a Turkish word, basturma. It describes a meat that is sliced, wind-dried, pickled with dried spices and then pressed.

  The technique was adopted by itinerant Jewish peddlers, Ms. Nathan said, who began to cure kosher meat in the same manner. Anyone looking for a taste of basturma should head to the Midwood section of Brooklyn, where the Mansoura family makes a fine version at the bakery of the same name at 515 Kings Highway.

  The development of pastrami as we know it today happened in America, Ms. Nathan said, when kosher beef became more widely available in the 19th century. These preserved meats were not easy to make in the home. Delicatessens, or stores selling prepared meats, rose up to help fill the need. By the 1930’s, said Joel Denker, author of “The World on a Plate: A Tour Through the History of America’s Ethnic Cuisine” (Westview Press), there were 5,000 of them in New York City, most serving home-cured pastrami.

  Most pastrami in New York is now made by large meat sellers, often as eager as the busy home cook or overworked deli owner to save time and money. One of them is Ira Rosner, a third-generation pastrami maker and the owner of Nation’s Best Wholesale Meat and Deli, a purveyor in the Hunts Point meat market in the Bronx.

  “Pastrami making has come a long way,” he said. “When my grandfather started out, he was coating his navels with salt and other stuff and hanging it to cure. Then he moved to wet-curing in wooden barrels. Then my dad started to hand-pump the navel with syringes containing the brining solution. Now look.”

  Mr. Rosner pointed to a conveyor belt, on which navels were passing beneath a contraption that plunged needles into each one and filled them with a seasoned brine. From the belt and after a night’s rest, he told me, they go into an oven and are smoked with hickory and apple wood, 3,000 pounds at a time. Mr. Rosner makes 100,000 pounds of pastrami a week, and it’s quite good.

  Braving a Growl For a Thick Cup of Soup

  By SUZANNE HAMLIN | March 6, 1996

  People lined up for a taste of soup from the infamous ‘Soup Nazi,’ on November 7, 1996.

  AL YEGANEH, THE SOUP MAN OF WEST 55TH Street, makes a mean pot of soup, which may explain why customers are willing to run a gantlet to get it.

  Mr. Yeganeh, whom television viewers know, sort of, from the sitcom “Seinfeld,” unquestionably makes great soup. But is it worth a 40-minute wait in a biting wind? It was for several hundred people standing in line the day after a rerun of the “Seinfeld” episode that made him famous. The line snaked around the corner from Mr. Yeganeh’s Soup Kitchen International, a tiny storefront near Eighth Avenue.

  “This is a New York thing to do now, like going to the Empire State Building,” said Rick Wheaton, 23, a tourist from Orlando, Fla.

  On “Seinfeld,” an actor with an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Yeganeh portrays the stern soup-shop owner, who is referred to as “the Soup Nazi,” a name Mr. Yeganeh said is “a horrible term, which should never be used, ever.”

  Mr. Yeganeh’s takeout-only menu changes daily but always includes 8 to 11 thick, hot soups and 4 or 5 cold ones. The rich seafood bisque changes every day, depending on the availability of fresh ingredients.

  “This is art, not soup,” said Steve Melnick, a Wall Street analyst who had taken the subway uptown to the
shop.

  Seemingly, none of the soup supplicants objected to the posted rules: know what you want when you reach the counter, speak quickly and ask no questions, have your money ready and move to the extreme left after ordering.

  “No bread and no fruit!” the Soup Man yelled to his three helpers when a hapless fur-clad woman tried to change her order from mushroom barley to chicken chili.

  Bread and fruit are sometimes added at no charge. Why some are blessed and others are not may seem a mystery to most customers but is obvious to Mr. Yeganeh. The fruit and bread people have not interrupted the flow of the transaction, which he believes should be seven seconds a customer, tops.

  Know what you want when you reach the counter, speak quickly and ask no questions, have your money ready and move to the extreme left after ordering.

  Mr. Yeganeh himself is not always so quick to respond. Both HarperCollins and Crown publishers offered him a $150,000 advance, a substantial amount for a first cookbook, but have withdrawn their offers.

  The hitch is in the details, Mr. Yeganeh said. “They want me to go around the country to publicize the book,” he explained. “But I ask you, how could I leave my soup?”

  His Way, Or No Way

  By CHRISTINE MUHLKE | October 9, 2008

  THE LEGENDARY BON VIVANT LUDWIG Bemelmans once observed, “The most strenuous customer-versus-proprietor battles occur in the smart restaurants of Paris and New York. This kind of restaurant, as a rule, is small. It is benefited by a certain type of guest and injured by another, and the latter must be discouraged from coming. In a man confronted daily with the task of separating the wanted from the unwanted, a degree of arrogance is indispensable.”

  Confronted daily with the task of deciding who gets to eat at Shopsin’s General Store, his 20-seat restaurant in the Essex Street Market, the cook and owner Kenny Shopsin separates the wanted from the unwanted with a degree of foulmouthed eloquence that makes Lenny Bruce look like Sirio Maccioni. “We have a really wonderful relationship with our customers for the most part,” he said. “We kick [expletive] out. Regularly.”

  Order off the menu? Out. Cell phone call? Forget it. Or maybe Shopsin simply doesn’t like you. Let’s just say that years ago, when I took Alain Ducasse to dinner at Shopsin’s—I ate there weekly for eight years, until I lost it in the divorce—I knew better than to introduce him to the cook whose food he was praising. I waited weeks to tell Shopsin, who softened and got borderline misty for a second before bellowing that he would have kicked him out.

  It’s not the most Danny Meyer-like approach to cultivating clientele, but after 28 years behind the stove, Shopsin wants to cook only for people he likes. “I’m not a very mature person,” he says after a lunch shift, his white hair kept at bay by an appropriately McEnroesque headband. “Sometimes my mind works a bit too fast, and I come to the conclusion of a relationship with customers faster than they get there. The abruptness of my understanding the essence of what’s happening is really upsetting to them and makes them vindictive and angry.” (One man, refused service at the original Bedford Street grocery-turned-restaurant, ripped a toilet out of the floor.)

  “We have a really wonderful relationship with our customers for the most part,” he said. “We kick [expletive] out. Regularly.”

  Unlike other restaurateurs, Shopsin has refused publicity. Whenever I tried to write about him, he would tell the fact-checkers that Shopsin’s was a shoe store or out of business or insist that they do something uncheckable to themselves. But two regulars, a Knopf editor and a literary agent, persuaded him to write a cookbook. “Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin” blends recipes with uncensored thoughts on cooking (“The only explanation I can give for … how I came to this method of cooking is that it’s a product of a lot of psychotherapy, drugs and making chicken potpies”).

  Shopsin is dreading the attention “Eat Me” will attract, claiming it will draw the wrong people for the wrong reasons. “The brilliance of my restaurant is that the customer base is soooo special,” he says. They know that the real reason Shopsin’s has been successful for so long is that it has such a huge heart.

  “I was thinking I could learn to be insincere,” he says in book mode. “But the first day I really go off, I’ll probably just close for a month.”

  ETHNIC FOODS AND MARKETS

  On Spring Street, Revival

  By FRANCIS X. CLINES | March 28, 1978

  AFTER ALL THE MEN HAD DIED—GENNARO the founder; his son, Giovanni; and Uncle Patsy, the maitre d’—Grandmother Filomena kept the Lombardi family’s restaurant open until she got too old and it finally faded like the rest of Spring Street. In her mid-70’s she kept offering her rich sauce-and-pasta dishes when many neighbors had run out after that man Robert Moses said his expressway would be coming right through this part of Little Italy.

  “Grandma was a tough old lady,” says her 34-year-old grandson, Gerry—the latest Lombardi to carry the name Gennaro. “She’d always say in Italian, ‘They’ll have to carry me out.’ That’s what happened—she died in the back of the restaurant, in the middle dining room.”

  By then, three years ago, Spring Street between Mulberry and Lafayette—a single block that had once served well as a lively substitute for Naples—was a graveyard. The old butcher had gone, along with a grocer, a barber, a drugstore, a leather- worker’s shop, an ice-cream parlor, a clothing store and the Spring Lounge, a bar on the corner of Mulberry Street where the young customers used to keep a secure eye on the neighborhood.

  Filomena thought so much of the building that she instructed the family in her will that if one of the grandchildren wanted to revive the restaurant, the heirs should cooperate before putting the building on the market. Gerry took the chance and got a half-price bargain from the family on the building. He got a small-business loan and renovated the restaurant, uncovering its old terrazzo floors and porcelain kitchen ceiling. He hired Giovanni Calderon as chef to add a lighter northern cream touch to the menu.

  Then Mr. Guidetti, a local undertaker, rented one of the abandoned stores on the Mulberry corner and opened an espresso café, Primavera. Across the way, one of Gerry’s boyhood friends, Rocco Morelli, opened Rocky’s pizza and sandwich shop. They talked Danny the newsdealer from across Lafayette into moving to their block. The Spring Lounge reopened after two years.

  The merchants themselves cleaned up DeSalvio Park. They also bought a long fire hose, and every night after 12 they take turns hooking it up to a hydrant and hosing down the sidewalks and gutters of Spring Street, making it so fresh, Gerry says, that Filomena would have been proud.

  A Big Bite of Italy And Old New York

  By REGINA SCHRAMBLING | August 28, 2002

  ARTHUR AVENUE IN THE BRONX CULTIVATES the image of “Cucina Paradiso,” complete with a booming soundtrack by Dean Martin at his sappiest. It would be easy to write the neighborhood off as a culinary theme park, a Neapolitan Epcot Center staffed by stock characters. There’s enough sweet abbondanza to choke a hardened Manhattanite.

  But merchants in this gritty Little Italy say it is thriving while the better-known one downtown has been hurting since the 9/11 attacks. And that’s because Arthur Avenue has never catered to fickle tourists, but to passionately loyal shoppers looking for mozzarella so fresh it oozes, for the supplest veal, for fettuccine cut to order, for sausages in a dozen variations.

  It’s Citarella on steroids, Zabar’s on Xanax—it has everything, but the mood is amazingly mellow. Ritual is the real nourishment. Every transaction is personalized. Ask for mozzarella at the Casa Della Mozzarella and the quiz begins: Fresh or smoked? Small, medium or large? Salted or unsalted?

  But no shop compares with Borgatti’s, where a curtain separates the kitchen from the showroom and ancient signs advise “this corner for ravioli.” When I asked what kind of fresh pasta was available, the grandmotherly clerk pulled out a tattered chunk of cardboard painted with yellow stripes in increasing widths.

  I pointed to No
. 2. She went to a pile of sheets of fresh pasta, weighed out a pound, then carried it across the room and ran it through a hand-cranked cutter to produce fettuccine-size strands. Next she mounded them onto a sheet of white paper, dusted them with a scoop of cornmeal from a barrel on the counter, tossed them until they were coated and finally folded them into a tidy little package before taking my $1.60.

  When I cooked the noodles the next day, they were still pliable, not at all like the crackling strands of indeterminate age sold in every other food shop in this city. And they tasted like the essence of Italy, with that firm texture and eggy flavor that makes sauce almost superfluous.

  A Family, a Feud And a Six-Foot Sandwich

  By GLENN COLLINS | December 8, 2001

  SINCE THE 9/11 ATTACKS, THERE HAS BEEN no shortage of heartwarming stories about long-feuding families setting aside their differences in an inspirational repudiation of strife-mongering in a war-torn world. This is not one of them.

  Salvatore Dell’Orto and his youngest brother, James—each the proprietors of New York culinary landmarks bearing the name Manganaro—are still not speaking. After 25 years.

  Indeed, the five daughters of Sal (as everyone calls him) do not speak to the three sons and three daughters of Jimmy (as everyone calls him). This, despite the reality that both families spend all their days, and not a few nights, working on either side of a common wall that is two bricks thick. The wall separates Manganaro’s Hero-Boy—a 40-year-old sandwich shop at 492-494 Ninth Avenue, near 37th Street—from the Manganaro Grosseria Italiana (formally known as Manganaro Foods), a century-old specialty grocery and restaurant at 488 Ninth Avenue.

  Even in the annals of New York’s most appalling food fights, the Manganaro battle is an envelope pusher. It has been in court for 14 years. At issue is which store has the right to take telephone orders for party-size sandwiches—the famous Hero-Boy—under the Manganaro name. So far, Hero-Boy has prevailed.