Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (21 page)

Even kosher delis in Manhattan have considerably broadened their fare in order to cater to the ever-widening Jewish palate. Mr. Broadway Bar and Grill, an upscale kosher deli in Herald Square that was built on the site of a 1920s kosher dairy restaurant, offers sushi, Chinese food, and Israeli food—as well as a full selection of wines and beers—along with its overstuffed pastrami sandwiches. A few blocks east, on East Thirty-Fourth Street, one finds Eden Wok—a kosher Chinese eatery—that sells kosher hot dogs in egg-roll wrappers, a kosher dairy restaurant called Tiberias, a kosher Baskin Robbins / Dunkin Donuts franchise, and Mendy’s (part of a chain of kosher delis, including one in Grand Central Terminal) that has a menu that extends to burgers and shawarma.

In pondering the decline of the deli, I am influenced by the Yiddish scholar Jeffrey Shandler, who calls Yiddish a “postvernacular” language at this stage of its evolution in America—a language that relatively few Jews (outside of ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn and upstate New York) speak but for which many Jews retain a sentimental attachment. In inventing this term, Shandler follows in the footsteps of David Hollinger, who developed the idea of “postethnic” identity, in which cultural affiliation is no longer a matter of genealogical descent but is instead a matter of consent—or, one could say, choice.
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In tribute to both of these scholars, I would like to call the deli “postgastronomic,” in the sense that most Jews, even of Ashkenazic heritage, do not eat in delis on a regular basis any more, and deli food no longer plays a central role in American Jewish culture. At the same time, the deli itself could also be called “postcommunal,” in that the deli no longer serves as a central gathering place for the Jewish community—even as deli foods such as pastrami continue to be icons of New York for both Jews and non-Jews alike.

The French Jewish publisher and scholar Pierra Nora, who is a Holocaust survivor, argues in his monumental seven-volume edited text about the relationship between memory and history that the historical basis on which society (in his case, French society, although he extends it to Western culture in general) has rested for centuries has been almost entirely eroded and replaced by what he calls
lieux de memoire
(places, sites, or realms of memory) that purport to open up a conceptual gateway to the past. Nora writes, “Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, fraternal orders—these are boundary stones of another age, illusions of eternity.” Furthermore, according to Nora, “It is the nostalgic dimensions of these devotional institutions that make them seem beleaguered and cold. They mark the rituals of a society without ritual.”
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Nora, who escaped the Gestapo by jumping out the window of a school building, often refers to Jews in his book; at one point, he puts even the Tablets of the Law in the category of memorial objects. While he does not allude specifically to Jewish delicatessens—or any type of food stores or restaurants, for that matter—Nora refers to “nonpracticing Jews, many of whom have felt a need in recent years to explore memories of the Jewish past.” Memory, for Nora, serves an essential role in the constitution of Jewish identity. “To be Jewish,” Nora writes, “is to remember being Jewish.”
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Delis, in Nora’s terms, might be viewed as furnishing a kind of last rites for Ashkenazic Jewish culture, a culture that no longer functions as an organic part of New York Jewish life other than in the occasional klezmer concert or Yiddish theater production (increasingly translated into English and restaged in a contemporary, multicultural idiom). The ritual of deli-going, which used to be a weekly or even daily one, is virtually defunct in an age in which pastrami is available in every franchise sandwich store and the few remaining Jewish delis cater almost entirely to tourists.

The deli is a
lieu de memoire
in many senses. It functions as a kind of museum, a place where the past—or some concept of the past—can be exhibited and consumed. The overarching irony is that while the deli seems to gesture to, or even recapitulate, Jewish history both in eastern Europe and on the Lower East Side, we have seen that the deli was not an especially prominent part of Jewish life in either place. There is something undifferentiated about this historical consciousness, in that it takes little stock of important differences between the generations.

In a description of the typical deli counter in Brooklyn, Elliot Willensky catalogues the “ritualized row of glass cases,” including a shorter one with different types of meat (“all cut on the bias, the better to show their stuff”) and a taller one with metal trays of coleslaw, potato salad, chopped liver, and so on. He rhapsodizes about the huge jars of condiments, including sauerkraut,
sweet or hot red peppers, green tomatoes, and pickles. The pickles, he recalls, ranged from “really” sour, “wrinkled and olive drab in color,” to half sour, “plump, pimpled, still dark green, and almost white inside.” Finally, he recalls the drinks and mustard, concluding that even when you took food home, it never tasted so good as in the deli itself, with its beloved sights, sounds, and smells.
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But nostalgia is not simply a wistful and passive embrace. As the sociologist Fred Davis has written, nostalgia is an active process; it is “one of the means—or better, one of the more readily accessible psychological lenses—we employ in the never-ending work of constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing our identities.”
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For Davis, nostalgia is an active process—an expenditure of psychological energy in the service of remaking ourselves in the image of our own past, however we understand and appreciate that past.

Delis indeed attempt through their decor and ambience to spur nostalgia. Ronnie Dragoon, the owner of the Ben’s chain, is opening new delicatessens, and not just in the New York area; in addition to breaking ground on one in Scarsdale (in Westchester County), he plans to open others in Washington, DC, and Boston. His delis, including one in Boca Raton, Florida, boast an extravagantly faux–Art Deco style, incorporating curved wood, burnished metal, frosted glass, mosaic tiles, bold colors, and ceilings with Chagall-like designs that could be part of the stage for a production of
Fiddler on the Roof
—an effect that is heightened by the Jewish folk music playing in the background—what Dragoon calls “melding a new style with an old feeling.”
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Nevertheless, given the dearth of delis, finding food that satisfies the desire for Jewish nostalgia can be difficult. As the food critic Mimi Sheraton has complained, Jewish foods that are true to the classics of her youth are almost impossible to find nowadays, whether in or out of the city.
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Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg mourned the loss of the corned beef that he remembered from his own youth. “When we were all on the Lower
East Side, every mom-and-pop store cured its own,” he complained in 1999. “That was one thing. Now you get two-week-old corned beef, supermarket corned beef and corned beef and cheese—utter desecrations of Jewish soul food.”
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Yet, authenticity is inherently a subjective concept—what rings true or feels right to one person does not necessarily seem that way to another. As Darra Goldstein, the former editor of the journal
Gastronomica
, has suggested, “If a dish resonates for us, evoking memories of another time or place, if it connects us with something beyond the present moment, then it should be considered authentic enough, even if its ingredients and methods have changed. . . . Food can take new forms in different times and places yet still remain genuine in spirit. We should continue to pay attention to tradition, to understand what’s come before. But to remain vital, recipes, like people, need to change.”
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A handful of new “hipster” delis, caught up in this passion for the authentic, are creating food that is variably described as gourmet, artisanal, or sustainable. Some of these delis, which the
New York Times
has oxymoronically dubbed “neo-retro,” are now focused on sustainability; they include Kenny and Zuke’s in Portland, Oregon; Kaplansky’s in Toronto; Neal’s in Carrboro, North Carolina; Wise Sons in San Francisco, Wexler’s in Los Angeles; and Mile End in Brooklyn and Manhattan. These delis, according to one journalist, find “up-and-coming chefs riffing on their grandparents’ pastrami sandwiches and matzo balls—while cooking up an antidote to the Jewish deli’s widespread demise.”
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These “riffs” include pickled bluefish instead of herring at DGS in Washington, DC, and an option of smoked beets instead of corned beef in the Reuben at General Muir in Atlanta—both of which also serve the Canadian dish poutine (french fries covered with cheese, gravy, and chunks of pastrami). Julia Moskin of the
Times
calls this trend “proof of a sudden and strong movement among young cooks, mostly Jewish-Americans, to embrace and redeem the foods of their forebears.”
22
Jewish foods such as bagels and smoked fish that were identified in the past with appetizing stores are now subsumed under the catchall designation of “deli”; in a recent roundup of Jewish food stores in New York, the journalist Michael Kaminer describes even bagel stores as “delis.”
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A nine-course Shabbat dinner at the City Grit Restaurant organized by Mile End at the 2012 Food Network New York City Wine and Food Festival featured signature dishes from all of these establishments; the menu included smoked trout mousse, schmaltzed chanterelles, bone marrow matzoh ball soup, duck confit and wild-mushroom-stuffed cabbage, and a “deconstructed” babka for dessert.
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Deli owners from across the country were themselves in attendance, and the meal was followed the next day by two back-to-back panel discussions at ABC Carpet, an upscale home-furnishings store—the first, moderated by Joan Nathan, was on the future of Jewish food; the second, moderated by David Sax, was on the future of the deli. The discussion itself, like the meat had been, was free-ranging, and it pointed up the inherently subjective nature of Jewish food, which seems to mean very different things to different people, depending on their ethnic (Ashkenazic or Sephardic) upbringing and family of origin. But the speakers seemed to agree that as Jews become more assimilated, their interest in Jewish food tends to decline.

The
Time
food columnist Josh Ozersky called the future of Jewish food an “existential issue,” explaining that “Jewish food comes out of two things—theology and poverty, neither of which impinges on most Jews nowadays, who are secular to the bone.” Given that his own grandmother’s signature dish was roast pork, Ozersky confessed, it may be no surprise that many Jewish foods never attained what he called “totemic status” but that Jewish cooking remained focused on just a few foods—brisket, matzoh balls, bagels—that prevented it from developing a full-fledged cuisine. “It’s like a rejected lover going over the same two letters over and over again,” he mused.
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As Ozersky has noted elsewhere, the Jewish deli “had
terroir
; now
that it’s become this isolated pocket, all these places that remain that have this New York character are constantly in danger of becoming, essentially, self-referential parodies.” He called Katz’s the “old-time, antiquarian classic” that all New York delis have as their reference point.
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Without the New York Jewish
terroir
(the French term for the effect of landscape, geology, and climate on the foods and wines of a region), he wonders if the deli can survive.

Nevertheless, the trend toward sustainability in the world of the Jewish deli suggests that these old dishes have had new, organic life breathed into them. Karen Adelman, co-owner of Saul’s in Berkeley, has told the
Times
that the deli betrayed its ancient Jewish roots long ago by moving away from traditional Jewish attitudes toward the earth, in which economy, creativity, and freshness ruled the day—meat and other food was not wasted, all parts of the animal were used, and vegetables were served in season.
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These principles, she says, are honored at Saul’s, where the portions are small, the beef is local and grass-fed, the pickles are only served during June to November, and the celery soda is made in house to avoid buying it from industrial food manufacturers. Adelman insists that the deli’s origins are “scrappy and sustainable” and that along the way, the deli “got supersized along with everything else.” Delis walk a fine line between appealing to customers’ emotions (and taste buds) and to their ethical and environmental values. As Adelman puts it, “Everyone feels like they own this cuisine. It’s connected to nostalgia, to comfort, to religion.”
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Sustainability, however, is a moving target. Take the concept of “local,” which is notoriously difficult to define. Noah Bernamoff, the owner of Mile End, has conceded that the amount of meat that he serves cannot be sourced from farms in upstate New York or even from the tristate area. He goes through a hundred briskets a week—each cow has two briskets, so he needs the meat of fifty cows, even though most local farms raise but 250 head of cattle each season. So while Bernamoff can source eggs, milk, and trout from farms in the Catskills, he
is obliged to import most of his beef from the Midwest, using the “natural” (free from antibiotics and growth hormones) line of Black Angus beef from Creekstone Farms, which has surpassed Niman Ranch in recent years to supply many of the country’s most upscale restaurants.
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Bernamoff insists on importing bagels from his native Montreal—they have become somewhat of a delicacy in New York. So Mile End’s products may be mostly made from scratch (some items are almost impossible to make in house; for example, very few delis make their own hot dogs) with even the spices freshly ground, but they do not necessarily have a low environmental impact. As he told me, “I have to make a multitude of decisions that have a real economic cost. The full scope of sustainability has to include the viability of the business itself.”
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Mile End, which opened in 2010 with only nineteen seats, operates on the philosophy that, according to Bernamoff, “It’s not looking for shortcuts, and that’s what the average deli became—how can we shortcut everything to lower our prices, because people won’t pay more money but want bigger portions?”
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Peter Levitt of Saul’s has echoed this sentiment, noting that “large, cheap meat sandwiches are a losing proposition for any restaurant.”
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By reversing the custom of serving big portions for their own sake, Bernamoff is able to do everything by hand rather than by machine. But he said that customers need to understand that meat (especially grass-fed beef) is more expensive than ever and that the overstuffed sandwich is a thing of the past.