Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (22 page)

“Customers still want that overstuffed sandwich for ten bucks,” Bernamoff conceded. “But we can’t provide that. In the meantime, the famous delis like Katz’s and Second Avenue make much more money, because they don’t need the kind of skilled labor that I need in order to make everything from scratch.” While he reported that close to a third of his revenue comes from the sale of smoked meat, he pays a dollar more per pound for it than the cost of commodity beef. “It’s up to the customers
to save the deli,” Bernamoff said, “so that it won’t feed upon itself and implode. The people who are most to blame [for the decline of the deli] are those who are throwing up their hands and asking where the delis went.”
33

Bernamoff, who along with his wife, Rae, recently published a cookbook of the dishes served at his restaurant, aspires to have Jewish food be compared favorably to other ethnic cuisines, which have attained gourmet status in America. “Why can’t deli food be taken seriously?” he asked. Bernamoff speculated that because after the Second World War Jewish food was mostly made at home, the delis “had it easy.” By adopting the use of supermarket convenience foods, delis took shortcuts even in the preparation of their specialties, like Italian restaurants serving spaghetti from a box. This gave the customers a dependable, standardized experience of eating in a deli. But the experience of eating at Mile End is “highly variable,” Bernamoff conceded, because “you can only have the best sandwich if you know that you can also have the worst.” Deli meats, he said, have become utterly “generic” through mechanization, so that “you can never have a bad sandwich, but you can also never have a great sandwich.” He sees himself as restoring the very concept of the delicacy to the deli, noting that a delicacy was “something special that people appreciated, but were forced to eat in moderation. You need to move forward by looking back.” Bernamoff views his deli’s signature offering not as smoked meat but as schmaltz, the rendered chicken fat that he uses for cooking and baking and even as salad oil. He calls schmaltz the “symbol par excellence of the age-old resourcefulness of Jewish cooks, who were doing nose-to-tail cuisine centuries before it became a hip urban trend. Nothing wasted, everything savored.”
34

Bernamoff chose to open his restaurants in neighborhoods that are, as he put it, “not oriented toward traditional deli customers” but instead toward a younger, more adventurous clientele. Most of his customers are not Jewish; many are experiencing the taste of deli for the first time. “We’re making food that is not about nostalgia,” he said, “but simply about the experience
of eating.” He said that he is grateful to the food writers in New York, who have compared his restaurant not to other delis but to other non-Jewish restaurants that serve gourmet food.
35
He has also recently started selling craft beers, including smoked beer from a German brewery.
36

Bernamoff also knows that eating in a Jewish deli is about much more than the food itself. Mile End self-consciously attempts to re-create what Bernamoff terms the “deli culture” of Montreal, what he calls “the culture of going out on Sundays and having bagels and lox, or getting eggs and bacon.” He describes his family’s tradition of eating out for Sunday brunch as “very ritualistic,” explaining, “the strength of that ritual was what I was really trying to bring to Mile End when we first opened.” He thoughtfully adds that in order for a restaurant to succeed, it has to embody the personality of its owner; the restaurant “has to be an extension of yourself, it has to represent those aspects of yourself that you want to celebrate. It’s so much more than just serving food to people.”
37
As he told the
Times
, “When I see tourists going into Katz’s, I feel a kind of rage. This is the food of my people, and places like that are turning it into a joke.”
38

It is ironic that for Jewish deli food to be what Bernamoff calls the “food of my people,” it needs to be prepared in a way that corresponds as much to contemporary (basically secular) values as to ancestral (mostly religious) ones. As he put it, even younger Jews nowadays “expect deli food, like holiday food, to be glued in time.” What they do not realize, he said, is that these foods can be updated and still retain the “rustic, comforting, familiar” flavor and appearance of foods that are based in an ethnic culture, whether it be Jewish, Italian, or Chinese. “I have no Italian roots whatsoever,” he said, “but I can still enjoy rich, warming Italian food.”
39
Bernamoff’s latest venture, Black Seed Bagels, brings Montreal-style bagels to New York, where they have begun to attract a wide following.

As in Israel, where gourmet pork and shellfish dishes are increasingly marketed to middle- and high-end Jewish customers,
Jewish restaurants in New York have begun to incorporate aggressively nonkosher food into deli fare. While it is obviously nothing new for a (nonkosher) Jewish deli to serve such food, the emphasis here is self-consciously and ironically on identity and assimilation. This irony extends well beyond the world of delis; at JoeDough (a sandwich-shop version of the upscale restaurant JoeDoe), Irish American owner Joe Dobias serves The Conflicted Jew—chicken liver, onion, and bacon on challah. The late cookbook author Gil Marks, while comparing the consumption of such a concoction by a Jew to “an American eating a horse,” also recognized that eating such a sandwich can represent an ongoing connection to tradition, if only in the act of struggling to free oneself from it. “You always retain your roots, to a certain extent, no matter how hard you try to reject them,” he observed.
40

Similar issues pertain to Traif, a restaurant in Williamsburg (where many ultra-Orthodox Jews live) owned by a Jewish chef named Jason Marcus, which pushes the envelope quite boldly by advertising itself as “celebrating pork, shellfish, and globally-inspired soul food.” A recent dinner menu at Traif included shiso-bacon-wrapped skate tempura, scallop carpaccio, charred baby octopus, and braised Berkshire pork cheek. And for dessert? Donuts sprinkled with bacon crumbs. Marcus once confided that his restaurant is quite popular with ex-Hasidic Jews; a renegade Hasid even showed up in a van in the middle of the night for a take-out order of the eatery’s pork specialties.
41

Nor does one need to eat at a deli per se in order to eat foods inspired by the Jewish deli. Kutsher’s Tribeca (an outpost of the famed Catskills hotel, the last of the great Jewish resorts in upstate New York), which calls itself a “modern Jewish American bistro,” serves such entrees as pot-roasted beef flanken, wild mushroom and fresh ricotta kreplach, and—a modern version of gefilte fish—diced wild halibut poached in fish stock. It also serves a deli charcuterie platter (on a wooden board) of pastrami, smoked veal tongue, salami, duck pastrami, and chopped liver—most of which are cured and smoked in house—along with homemade celery soda.

Adeena Sussman of the
Forward
newspaper has dubbed such culinary reinventions “haute haimish grub”
42
—examples of which are cropping up everywhere in New York, such as the celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s kasha varnishkes (served with veal meatballs) at ABC Kitchen, the caviar knish at Torrisi Italian Specialties, and the Deli Ramen at Josh Kaplan’s restaurant, Dassara, a dish that is composed of Japanese noodle soup with matzoh balls and strips of smoked meat. Such newfangled Jewish dishes are not entirely new; one thinks of the fusion between Jewish and Chinese food that is exemplified by the pastrami egg rolls and Chinese hot dogs at Eden Wok. But the gourmetization of Jewish food represents a different stage in its evolution; it suggests that Jewish food is wide open to reinterpretation and that one can play with the boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish food while also playing with the distinctions between the upscale and the ethnic. Perhaps the best example is at Vinegar Hill House in Brooklyn: the stuffed cabbage is filled with curried goat, lima beans, and spinach.
43

Delis throughout the country continue to trade on the association of “New York” with deli authenticity. This appears to be a particularly trendy concept in the Southwest, where former New Yorkers—or their descendants—have opened Kenny and Ziggy’s New York Delicatessen Restaurant in Houston, New York Deli News in Denver, Chompie’s New York Deli in Phoenix, and many others. (Nor is this phenomenon limited to the United States; there are “New York” delis in London, Cardiff, Tokyo, Jakarta, and scores of other cities around the globe.) The “New York” deli connotes a turn-back-the-clock, back-to-the-source quality. It suggests a style of restaurant notable for overstuffed sandwiches, eastern European Jewish dishes, the delirious scent of pickle brine, and an ambience that is loud, crowded, busy, and lively.

Indeed, by advertising a store or restaurant as one serving “New York” food—whether deli sandwiches, bagels, or pizza—the owner implicitly suggests that this is where that type of food
originated, where it reached its highest quality, or where it became most famous. Many of these restaurants also put New York memorabilia up on their walls, such as playbills, caricatures of stage stars, and photographs of New York landmarks.

Nor do “New York” delis need be very far from New York. The Carnegie Deli has an outpost in the Sands Casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where busloads of Chinese immigrants from New York arrive daily to play the slots—and perhaps eat a pastrami sandwich. Harold’s New York Deli in Edison, New Jersey, takes the supersize concept to its logical extreme, serving sandwiches, soups, and cakes that are so mammoth that one is more than enough for an entire table of diners. The experience of eating at Harold’s reminded an Asian American food blogger, Mary Kong-Devito, of
Alice in Wonderland
; she joked that she “felt like a shrunken Alice at The Mad Hattowitz’s Tea Party.” She described the matzoh ball soup as “over sixty ounces of chicken soup, carrots, celery, chunk white chicken and a matzo ball bigger than Leonard Bernstein’s head.” The sandwiches, she reported, are “so enormous that you could share with a village.”
44

It is also striking that delis,
especially nonkosher ones
, are persistently, if rather tongue-in-cheek, described in religious terms. One of the African American slicers at Katz’s is nicknamed the “Reverend of Pastrami,” as if the deli counter is his church and the customers his congregants. Perhaps not coincidentally, the “reverend” presides over the same deli that
New York
magazine described as a “shrine, the soul of American Jewish cuisine” when it was rumored a few years ago that the building in which Katz is housed was being bought by real estate developers.
45
That the Jewish deli became an analogue to the synagogue, or even to the Temple in Jerusalem, has been suggested throughout this book. But it is striking that the deli sandwich is still imbued with so much quasi-religious symbolism, and it speaks to the intensity of the ambivalence that so many secular Jews still have about their religion, to the extent that this kind of humor still carries a charge.

Given that Jews are no longer a reliable customer base for Jewish delis, the delis that are going strong appeal largely to tourists. After reopening in midtown on Third Avenue and Thirty-Third Street, the Second Avenue Deli (still using its trademark sign of faux Hebrew or Yiddish letters) recently added a second branch on First Avenue and Seventy-Fifth Street. These locations, neither of which is actually on Second Avenue, have a very different vibe from the East Village; the Lower East Side, countercultural feel that the deli enjoyed for so many years is gone. To the extent that New York remains a city of distinct neighborhoods (this is a question in itself, given gentrification, the rise in real estate prices, and the proliferation of chain stores and franchises), a deli that is wrenched out of its original location and plopped down in a different part of the city is like a plant that has to grow new roots.

The very idea that the deli’s name and the food that it offers are more important than its physical location represents a reversal of the whole concept of the traditional deli, where both the menu and the quality of the food were both fairly standard whatever deli you visited, and what mattered far more was where the deli was and the social network that it nurtured and that supported it in turn. The idea that you could put the Second Avenue Deli anywhere in the city and it would still be the Second Avenue Deli suggests that a deli is all about the food and the ambience and not about its embeddedness in community. The deli’s customers thus pay for the privilege of becoming walking advertisements for the restaurant, while also showing off that they know where to get a good pastrami sandwich. Not that the neighborhood vibe doesn’t exist at the Second Avenue Deli—people do seem to feel comfortable striking up conversations with total strangers who are sitting at neighboring tables. But, in a concession to contemporary restaurant etiquette, the waiters at the Second Avenue Deli, some of whom are old-time deli waiters, are instructed to be careful in dealing with customers and to refrain from insulting, or joking with, them.

The few kosher delis left in the outer boroughs do still serve, to some extent, as neighborhood hangouts. These include Jay and Lloyd’s in Brooklyn, Ben’s Best in Queens, and Liebman’s in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. (There are no kosher delis left on Staten Island; Golden’s, which was notable for having a real 1936 subway car plunked down in the middle of the restaurant, where it served as a small dining room, closed in early 2012.)
46
But in order to remain in business, even these off-the-beaten-track places have had to morph into “destination” restaurants; Ben’s Best has been visited by George W. Bush, featured on Martha Stewart’s television show, and appeared on the Food Network. This media attention gives Ben’s Best the aura of celebrity that was so much a part of the appeal of the nonkosher delis in the theater district. But rather than helping the customer feel special, as Jews so badly needed to do in the early to mid-twentieth century, the deli makes the customer feel like a tourist to a shrine—to a place that has been sacralized by its media exposure.