A couple goes out to eat one evening at the neighborhood kosher deli. They are amazed when a suave Chinese waiter, speaking perfect Yiddish, comes up to their table to take their order. On their way out, they ask the owner how he ever managed to train a Chinese waiter to speak Yiddish. “Shh,” he tells them, “he thinks I’m teaching him English!”
The setting for this revealing joke is the Lower East Side, where most Jews (and Chinese) settled when they first arrived in the United States. Only in that neighborhood, where so many Jews lived in such close proximity to one another, could a non-Jewish immigrant possibly confuse the language spoken by everyone around him with the language of the American people. To think that anyone could confuse Yiddish and English—this was hilarious to Jews, given how much outside the mainstream Jews knew themselves to be. If only Yiddish and English were the same, then Jews might not suffer so acutely their exclusion from American society. The waiter believes that he is on the way to becoming an American—wait until he finds out the truth! The only nation that he is assimilating into is the Jewish one.
And yet that is precisely it: the deli does represent America for the clueless Chinese waiter. It is, after all, the only “America” he knows outside his own community. In this sense, he is not so unlike the immigrant Jews themselves, for whom the deli was to become a place in which they began to erect the framework for an American identity. The waiter was to get his revenge when his own cuisine trumped that of the delicatessen. (And of course, Asians have been recently dubbed the “new Jews” for their success in American society; they are viewed as achieving this success in much the same way that Jews did, through a combination of intellect, sacrifice, hard work, and determination.)
It seems appropriate, then, that in Ben’s, a deli that boasts an Art Deco–style interior (“Who said a nosh can’t be posh?” reads the sign behind the deli counter that lists the hors d’oeuvres), the well-heeled, mostly Jewish patrons are literally surrounded by the words of this joke, as if embraced by a past in which the deli truly was the central institution in Jewish life. By reading—and perhaps even telling to each other—the joke in English, the patrons of Ben’s remind themselves how far they have come, how much they have transcended their own ancestors’ immigrant origins, how much they have succeeded in becoming American.
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When the Second Avenue Deli reopened in midtown Manhattan in late 2007 after having closed two years earlier in the East Village, it did so with much fanfare. Even though a thousand new restaurants open in New York every year, it would be difficult to think of another restaurant opening that generated quite so much excitement and anticipation. Almost every media outlet in the city descended on the deli to cover what was trumpeted, in messianic terms, as the “second coming” of the Second Avenue Deli, which is arguably the most famous kosher deli in America—and also one of the last.
The drama of the story was inescapable. Abe Lebewohl, the beloved deli owner, was murdered in broad daylight in 1996 (in a still-unsolved crime) while taking the deli’s receipts to the bank, leaving the business in the hands of his brother, Jack, who ran the deli until its demise, which he blamed on the skyrocketing real estate prices in the rapidly gentrifying East Village.
Now Jeremy Lebewohl, Jack’s twenty-five-year-old son, had emerged like a dark-horse candidate to take over the family business. Since when did the younger generation want to take over a deli? Hadn’t so many children of the owners of small ethnic businesses, including countless kosher delis, turned their back on the family business in order to become doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers? Would Jeremy be like his uncle—if he knew you were sick, would he show up in person at your apartment or dorm room with a bowl of chicken soup in his hand? Or would the new Second Avenue Deli be just a restaurant like any other? The story of the Second Avenue Deli encapsulated so many aspects of life in New York. Like a once-glorious sports team that had suffered a string of losing seasons but now had a scrappy new manager who was determined to win a pennant, the Second Avenue had a fighting chance once again. It had, you might say, a shot at redemption.
In fact, the Second Avenue Deli had for a long time worn the defiant, slightly pugnacious air of a survivor. It had opened originally in 1954, a good four decades after most Jews had moved away from the Lower East Side neighborhood, the immigrant ghetto known for its overcrowded, disease-ridden tenements and horrific sweatshops.
But the kosher deli, with its flashy lightbulb-bordered sign with faux-Yiddish letters, had insisted on serving the foods beloved of these same immigrants and their children, in the hopes of bringing them back for a taste of the old neighborhood. Both Jews and non-Jews made pilgrimages to the deli to soak up the atmosphere of the Jewish past. And Lebewohl was a well-known figure, given to outlandish publicity stunts such as creating busts of famous people in chopped liver, giving out free sausages when a baseball player hit a home run, and maintaining public friendships with a range of characters from Mayor Ed Koch to the pornographer Al Goldstein and pretty much everyone in between. From the handprints on the Walk of Fame outside the door to the Molly Picon room inside, the place glittered with the aura of celebrity while still trading on its down-at-the-heels East Village chic. It saw itself as having nurtured the growth of the downtown arts scene and particularly the emergence of off-Broadway in the 1960s.
The Second Avenue Deli had become a quintessential part of New York, its appeal extending to many non-Jews, including tourists from all over the world. I dined one evening in the old Second Avenue Deli when a group of Jewish artists and scholars whom I knew from New York University was replaced at the same table by a family wearing traditional African garb, as if they had just come from a meeting at the nearby United Nations. I regretted not having brought a camera; I would have liked to take pictures of the successive groups of people who occupied the same table at the deli over the course of a single evening. The photos would have said a lot not just about the deli but about the polyglot nature of the city.
Over time, then, the deli had come to stand for a whole host of places and experiences that New Yorkers (and others) felt had become endangered: for the Jewish Lower East Side, for the counterculture of the East Village (the demise of the Second Avenue Deli was compared by some observers to the recent shuttering of the punk music club CBGB’s), for immigrant Jewish culture (Yiddishkeit), for mom-and-pop businesses, for fatty Jewish food. Its closing seemed to mark the end of an era in more ways than one.
It is little wonder that when the deli closed on Tenth Street, a disappointed blogger sighed, “Sic transit gloria matzoh balls.”1 The comic Jackie Mason, a Second Avenue Deli regular, joked, “It’s almost like wiping out Carnegie Hall. . . . A sandwich to a Jew is just as important as a country to a gentile.”2 Its closing truly seemed to mark the end of an era, just as its rebirth two years later seemed nothing short of miraculous. But can any new deli bring back the days of yore? Or does it inevitably have what the journalist Ron Rosenbaum, writing for Slate, calls a “theme-park vibe, a whistling-past-the-graveyard-schmaltzy nostalgia for schmaltz”3—a cardboard-cutout version of the past?
The essayist Adam Gopnik has traced what he calls the “drying up” of Jewish comedy in New York to the period between the release of Annie Hall and the release of Broadway Danny Rose, in which the “black-and-white world of the comics shpritzing at the Carnegie Deli is frankly presented as a Chagall world, a folk-tale setting, the whole thing vanished.” Gopnik connects this transition to the fading of New York ethnic life in general, from the Asian countermen slicing fish at Zabar’s—the iconic gourmet Jewish food shop—on the Upper West Side to the lack of overt Jewish references on Seinfeld, where the “Jewish situations are mimed by rote, while the real energy of the jokes lies in the observation of secular middle-class manners.”4
For years, part of the experience of going to the Carnegie Deli in New York was watching a wacky promotional video, What a Pickle: The World’s Greatest Deli Musical, that played on a loop at the restaurant to divert those who were waiting on line. The video starts with the late owner, Milton Parker, shlepping around an immense pickle. It then switches to a black-and-white silent-movie format with intertitles and background music, in which one of the deli waiters is shown walking home after work and slipping on a pickle on the sidewalk, where he is helped up by a beautiful woman. He romances her by taking her for a picnic in Central Park with sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli. The video then shows the customers and waiters singing and dancing at the Carnegie, with a big-band theme of everyone “swinging” at the “Deli King.” The waiter disastrously juggles the food in a rapid-paced patter song, showing off the immense portions, including the “world’s biggest sandwiches” and “world’s biggest matzo ball.”5
Parker drops some names of celebrities and their favorite sandwiches, and then the video again switches modes, with “Barry Whitefish” (Wayne Lammers, who also codirected the video and wrote the lyrics), a Barry White look-alike clad entirely in white, who sings a mellow song about pastrami, kasha, and other deli specialties to his leggy blond date as they enjoy a candlelight dinner in the deli and go for a horse-and-buggy ride. After showing a brief segment on how the pastrami and cheesecake is prepared at the deli’s plant in New Jersey, the scene returns once more to the deli, where customers around the dining room yell out their hometowns, states, or countries (everywhere from New Jersey to India and Japan), and the video ends with a sing-along (complete with a bouncing ball) to the tune “Till We Meet Again,” including the words “Till We Eat Again / I’ll be thinking of food until we meet again.” Interposed in the middle of the song is a sequence of obviously non-Jewish waitresses, trying to insult the customers in stereotypically obnoxious fashion.
One of the most striking aspects of the video, which was produced in 1999, is how non-Jewish the Carnegie Deli seems. Other than the owner and manager, and perhaps the waiter who plays the main role, there is nary a Jewish person in the place—the waiters and customers almost all appear to be non-Jews. The clearly nonkosher food nevertheless does represent a link to Jewish tradition, but it is used either for Jews to romance non-Jews or for non-Jews to romance each other. The quality of the food seems much less important than the quantity, and the humorous aspects of the dining experience—the ridiculously huge portions, the funny-sounding names of the foods, the nasty waitresses, the boisterous fellow customers, the attempts of both staff and customers to be comedians, and the obsessive mock-seriousness with which the food is treated—come to the fore.
Thus, not only is it possible to find yourself in a video if you eat in the deli, but eating in the deli is like being on television—or in the movies. You are surrounded by pictures of celebrities, you eat the same foods that celebrities eat, and the entire atmosphere is one that performance theorists would call “ludic”—the playfulness is not incidental to the experience but constitutive of it. Rather than merely being a pleasant diversion while you wait on line, watching the video helps to create the frame for the dining experience, by giving the viewer a set of expectations and understandings that will condition the experience of the meal, which is tied up with notions of celebrity (and fantasies of being a celebrity), vaguely Jewishly coded foods (the pastrami, matzoh balls, etc.), and an overall sense of excess (the “world’s biggest sandwiches”). But unlike Sammy’s Rumanian Restaurant on the Lower East Side, a place that actually does incorporate comedy and music into the dining experience—a meal there is like a meal at a Jewish wedding or bar/bat mitzvah—the nonkosher Carnegie Deli seems to cater more to non-Jews than to Jews.
By contrast, because the kosher deli serves a mostly Jewish clientele, it is clearly an endangered species in New York; there are only about fifteen kosher delis left in the five boroughs—a 99 percent drop since the deli’s heyday in the 1930s. Noah’s Ark, the only remaining kosher deli on the Lower East Side, closed in 2013, as did Adelman’s, which was one of only three kosher delis left in southern Brooklyn—a former mecca for kosher delis. But, especially given Manhattan real estate prices, which make it almost impossible for nonchain restaurants to survive, even kosher-style delis are not immune; the Stage Deli closed at the end of 2012, a victim both of the overall decline in people’s appetite for Jewish deli foods and of rising retail rents that surpassed $1 million a year.6
While it may not be surprising that there are relatively few urban delis left, many suburban delis are suffering the same fate. Five kosher delis—two of which dated back to the 1950s—have closed on Long Island in just the past eighteen months, as fewer non-Orthodox Jews keep kosher and as deli food continues to give way to other, more multicultural alternatives. Scott Horowitz, the owner of the only kosher wholesaler left on Long Island, urges delis to reinvent corned beef and pastrami in new taste combinations—kosher tapas, for example. “If they taste it, they will like it,” he told the journalist Stewart Ain. “It’s not the staple it once was, and if they don’t get the young people, there’s no future in the business.”7 Steve Weiss, who owns Regal Kosher Deli in Plainview, told me flatly that “younger people have lost the taste for deli. They eat sushi instead.”8
Kosher food companies are thus increasingly marketing their products to non-Jews; in 2011, the media reported that Manischewitz has spent millions of dollars on advertisements that do not mention the words “Jewish” or “kosher.” The ads ran in mainstream newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Newark Star-Ledger. According to company spokesperson Elie Jacobs, “There’s a tagline we use, ‘Bringing families to the table since 1888,’ and we want to be part of that family with you whether it’s Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, or Easter.”9 Now that Manischewitz has been sold to a huge equity firm, Bain Capital, it is seeking more than ever to find non-Jewish customers, just as Hebrew National and Levy’s Rye Bread did beginning in the 1960s. In the words of the company’s chief rabbi, Yaakov Y. Horowitz, Manischewitz desires to “promote ‘kosher’ as a quality-control designation, rather than simply a religious one.”10 The humorist Paul Rudnick parodied this strategy in the New Yorker, inventing ludicrous imaginary Manischewitz campaigns in which creamy horseradish with dill is left for Santa on Christmas Eve and James Bond serves home-style potato latkes to the queen of England.11
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.12
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.”13
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.”14
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.15
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.”16 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.”17
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.18 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.”19
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.”20
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.”21
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.”23
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.24 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.25 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.26 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.27 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.”28
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.29
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.”30
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?”31 Peter Levitt of Saul’s has echoed this sentiment, noting that “large, cheap meat sandwiches are a losing proposition for any restaurant.”32 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.
“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.
Some of the nostalgia for the Jewish deli is for the time in which Jews from across the political and ideological spectrum regularly broke bread together. For a major split has regrettably occurred within the American Jewish community, with few Jewish contexts now present in which religious and secular Jews meet on a regular basis. In addition, most traditionally minded Jews are unwilling to eat in delis that are open on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and less observant Jews are unwilling to pay high prices (up to twenty dollars for a kosher soup-and-sandwich combination) for the privilege of eating kosher deli food. Except in smaller cities such as Memphis and St. Louis, where there are so few Jewish restaurants that the local kosher deli still attracts a wide range of customers, delis are less able to bridge differences between various types of Jews.
Ethnic Jewishness of the standard eastern European variety is on a steep decline. Few Jews speak Yiddish any more, except in ultra-Orthodox enclaves in Brooklyn and upstate New York, where it remains the everyday language. Jewish theaters throughout the country struggle to find an audience. Films and television shows that include Jewish characters may have Jewish references but rarely have Jewish themes. Non-Jews often seem more attracted to Judaism than Jews themselves are, as reflected in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David’s character’s non-Jewish wife makes a Passover seder, despite his contemptuous attitude toward the ritual. In many ways, Jews seem to be waving farewell to the religion and culture that once sustained them and that once undergirded so much of American culture in general.
One has only to glimpse the long lines of tourists waiting outside the Carnegie Deli in Times Square to appreciate that “destination” delis still play a role, if only to provide a taste of New York history to hungry tourists. The few remaining midtown delis, with their extravagant decor and overstuffed sandwiches, are still part of the uplifting of excess, the over-the-top quality of our popular culture. But the Jewishness of the Jewish deli has somewhat evaporated; indeed, a perusal of one hundred reviews revealed the mention of the word “Jewish” in only a small fraction of them. Much more likely to be mentioned was the fact that When Harry Met Sally was filmed there, suggesting that a knowledge of the deli scene in the film conditions customers’ experience of eating there as much as anything else.
Many Ashkenazic Jews have embraced Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food in recent years, trading fatty deli foods for lighter dishes cooked in olive oil—dishes that tend to feature fruits and vegetables rather than meat. The longing for Jewish deli also reflects the fact that many “deli” foods—the term has become quite elastic—have now become so much a part of the overall American diet that soon few will remember that their consumption was once essentially limited to immigrant Jews and their children. Pastrami (or a cheap cut of beef that is spiced and smoked to resemble old-fashioned Jewish pastrami) is retailed at almost every Subway and Quiznos sandwich franchise, with posters showing how the meat is “piled high” on the bread, just as in a traditional Jewish deli. The mainstreaming of delicatessen food is almost complete. Not that certain deli dishes are likely to survive outside of New York and outside of a traditional delicatessen—foods like rolled beef, tongue, and stuffed derma (beef intestine filled with fat, flour, and water).
Even the Second Avenue Deli is now selling smoked fish, which was traditionally reserved for appetizing stores. The word “deli” has lost its exclusive connection to meat, even in New York, to the extent that among the most famous “delis” in New York are Zabar’s (a take-out gourmet store and kitchenware emporium), Barney Greengrass (a bagel and smoked fish restaurant), and Russ and Daughters (an appetizing store).
Assimilation, neighborhood change, the diversification of the American Jewish population, the constantly widening range of food choices—all have had a deleterious effect on the deli. As a waiter at Ratner’s reflected not long before the restaurant’s closing, “This area was once home to the most densely populated Jewish community in the world, and home to the world’s finest kosher cuisine. But these days, instead of high-rise chopped liver sandwiches on rye, we have high-rise buildings.”47
As the delicatessen loses its primary place in American Jewish culture, Jewish food in general continues to assume an even greater place in the construction of American Jewish identity. There is much talk of “gastronomic” Jews or “bagel and lox Jews” (the term “pastrami Jew” has not yet been coined) who presumably connect to their Jewish identity chiefly through their stomachs. But, as discussed earlier, many Jewish foods—bagels are a prime example—have become so much part of the mainstream American diet that they have slipped their Jewish moorings. Outside of New York, even pastrami is bereft of its Jewish associations. At my local gas station in central Pennsylvania, I can buy a hot pastrami, brisket, or corned beef sandwich from the self-service kiosk, and it will be made to order before my gas has finished pumping.
Even in major cities, the delicatessen has become a museum piece, as exemplified in a 2006 exhibit in Philadelphia at the National Museum of American Jewish History. “Forshpeis! A Taste of the Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana” grouped memorabilia such as advertising signs, vintage kosher products, and cookbooks around iconic items such as a Formica-topped kitchen table and a deli counter. The counter was surrounded by menus, invoices, pickle crocks, a pillow in the shape of a Zion Kosher salami, and a counterman’s paper hat reading “Ask for Mrs. Weinberg’s Chopped Liver.” And a Jewish food exhibit in Baltimore, “Chosen Food,” which opened in 2011, featured items from my own collection, including a large neon sign from a shuttered New York deli called Pastrami Queen, a deli slicer and scale, and other memorabilia from delis throughout the country. Patrons could leave the exhibit and head around the corner to Attman’s, one of the few old-time Jewish delis that still exist in that city.
David Sax rhapsodizes about the freshness of the food at the Second Avenue Deli, at a time when many delis serve frozen french fries and day-old bread; he is also impressed by its continuing to serve mostly forgotten Ashkenazic dishes such as gribenes (fried chicken skins) and p’tcha (calf’s-foot jelly). But recapturing the past through food is tricky. As the food maven Arthur Schwartz pointed out to me, the experience of eating is about so much more than the actual food that one is consuming. This is why, he thinks, food “always tastes better on vacation.” Paraphrasing a book on the cuisine of Naples, Schwartz averred that the best clam sauce that you ever ate is the one that you enjoyed in Italy, on a veranda overlooking the sea, with your lover whispering in your ear.48
In line with Schwartz’s point about the context in which food is consumed, this book has examined some of the intangible aspects of the Jewish deli that made it such a crucial gathering space for the Jewish community—one that enabled it to sustain Jews not just physically but emotionally and socially as well. What are the Jewish “third places” of today? Aaron Bisman, the former head of JDub Records, which promoted Mattisyahu (the formerly Hasidic reggae singer), sees many younger Jews in their twenties and thirties as attracted to a “culture of choice” rather than a “religion of obligation.” While the immigrant enclaves of the turn of the twentieth century were what he calls “bastions of Jewish life,” he sees younger Jews as having “often lost the connection to their history, culture, and identity as Jews.” He points out the paradox that while they often feel like outsiders in American culture, given the predominantly Christian influence in American society, they also often feel estranged from their Jewish identity, given that they are so assimilated into American society. Without either synagogue or deli, both of which promoted Jewish identity within an American milieu, how can Jews feel comfortable either as Americans or as Jews? Perhaps the third space concept no longer works in a technologized world, in which Bisman views the nascent forms of Jewish community as inherently “fluid,” with “no borders,” and “existing outside the walls of any particular space.”49
Jews have become so integrated into mainstream culture that the deli is viewed as a throwback to an earlier era, in which unfamiliar Jewish foods symbolized the extent to which Jews were still aliens in American society. For example, in “So Jewtastic,” a VH1 video about Hollywood stars, wrestlers, musicians, and other celebrities who openly celebrate their Jewish ethnicity, Jewish deli food is shown to be both unrecognizable and unpalatable by most Americans. The comedian Elon Gold asks a slew of patrons of various ethnicities at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles if they can recognize a particular Jewish food that he shows them—almost none of them know that it is gefilte fish. He then demonstrates a circumcision on a frankfurter. The segment implicitly mocks the idea that Jews still have a cuisine worth eating, an interesting perspective given that the video was sent to directors of Jewish Community Centers throughout the country to be used to inspire young Jews with pride in their heritage.
Some leaders of the American Jewish community insist that only by revitalizing the synagogue can Jewish communal life be restored. Gary Rosenblatt, publisher of the New York Jewish Week, views Jewish newspapers and magazines as a venue in which Jews from different backgrounds and varying levels of religious observance find both a voice and a place of discussion and debate. But Rosenblatt, who grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, finds a physical “third space” in the modern Orthodox synagogue in Manhattan where he prays every weekday morning before work in order to say kaddish for his recently deceased mother. The regulars at the morning minyan, he points out, seem to gather as much to schmooze as to pray.50
Others, such as Rabbi Daniel Smokler, a Hillel rabbi at New York University, point toward the primacy of Jewish text as a “Jewish commons” of its own. Smokler’s argument is that while the “American commons is a practice rooted in shared space, the Jewish commons is a practice rooted in shared text.” Smokler has been very successful in bringing together particular “affinity” groups of college students—Persian Jews at UCLA, gay Jewish men at NYU, and so on—to study sacred Jewish texts together. Smokler takes the idea of the third space and applies it to the activity of studying sacred text, of promoting what he calls a “good, serious conversation,” one that “dignifies both the rich tradition of text and honors our own alienation from that tradition.”51 What an intriguing, paradoxical idea—that what Jews share above all is their “alienation” from their own heritage, their sense of being outsiders to their own religion. Isn’t this to some extent what the deli, as a secular Jewish alternative to the synagogue, was always about?
Then again, the meaning of the deli has changed for each generation of American Jews. The delicatessen (or what we could think of a delicatessen, with a focus on pickled meats) was almost unknown in eastern European Jewish life and was also not well established on the Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century—despite the tremendous nostalgia with which the delicatessen came to be invested.
The delicatessen only came into its own as Jews came into their own—as the second generation discovered the pleasures of eating out and felt most comfortable doing so in each other’s company. At its height in the interwar period, this Jewish gathering place was, paradoxically, a kind of way station, a staging ground or springboard for Jews to enter American life on equal terms with other Americans. The delicatessen nurtured their hopes and dreams, giving them a powerful sense of security and belonging. When the barriers to participation in American life fell in the wake of the Second World War, the meaning of the delicatessen changed yet again, becoming—especially for those Jews who remained in the New York area—just one choice of eatery among many.
As Jews moved to the suburbs, they also moved more into the mainstream of American society and ultimately turned their back on delicatessen food in favor of more gourmet, international, and healthier fare—even as the kosher meat companies sought to increase their market share by selling to non-Jews. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the delicatessen had long ceased to be a place where Jews gathered on a regular basis; indeed, there were few spaces that Jews, whether religious or secular, went to be with other Jews.
The story of the delicatessen exemplifies the overarching shifts that have taken place in American Jewish life, in which, even as the majority of Jews have become more secular (as the recent Pew Survey of American Judaism shows),52 this secular identity has lost much of its actual content; the overwhelming majority of American Jews say that they are “proud” to be Jewish but do little in the way of connecting concretely to their tradition. Moreover, while the consumption of Jewish food is, for many Jews, one of the sole ways in which they relate to their heritage, this food is taking all kinds of forms nowadays, sometimes playing on “traditional” delicatessen fare but often incorporating ingredients and styles of cooking that bear little or no relation to that type of food. And so, as time goes on, the delicatessen fades further and further into the past as a viable space either for Jewish gathering or for Jewish gastronomy.
As long as both Jews and non-Jews want to eat “traditional” Jewish food, delis will always exist in our culture. If they die out, they will be resurrected and reinvented in some form in the future. But they will probably never occupy the centrality in American Jewish life that they once did, as they helped to bridge the world of the immigrants and their children with the promise and freedom of America.