INTRODUCTION

It’s a balmy Friday night in June in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, and the glass doors of Jack’s Wife Freda are opened to the street. From the soft glow of the restaurant, an energetic hum of chatter spills onto the sidewalk and encourages the crowd gathered there to wait just a little longer for a table. Inside, past the full banquets where carafes of rosé are ringed in condensation, past the small bar packed three bodies deep, co-owner Dean Jankelowitz swings open the double doors of the kitchen. “One more order of zucchini chips for table thirteen on the fly, brother!” he hollers to the expediter. The decibel level of his voice reflects the frenetic clamor in the kitchen—a good ten degrees hotter than the humid evening air outside. The three chefs on the line are working at Mach speed, a hand flipping a butterflied chicken as the skin crisps on the hot grill, a wrist flicking the handle of a panful of vegetables in a bubbling, spicy coconut curry. “You got it!” the expediter bellows over the din of the stoves.

Dean flies out of the kitchen moments later, handing off the zucchini to a server, “Table thirteen, seat two.” She nods and weaves her way through the crowd with the precision of a ballerina.

Dean’s wife and partner, Maya, is hovering over the stereo system, tinkering with the bass on a reggae beat. She carries an old-world sense of superstition with her. If the music is personal and the volume is just so, the songs will serve as a siren beckoning in a steady flow of diners—never mind that at 9:00 P.M. the place is packed to the gills and the wait is thirty minutes long. Waving hello with one hand and clutching a notepad in the other, Maya breezes back to the door to take the name of a new party hoping for a table, offering them a fresh mint lemonade while they wait.

Dean clears the plates from a family of four and suggests they split his favorite malva pudding for dessert. “What’s malva?” the mother asks. “Oh, man, you have to try it. I’ll send you one . . .” His voice trails off as he turns back toward the kitchen. Dean is a notorious mumbler but quick with a witty one-liner before vanishing to attend to another pressing task. The family seems momentarily confused—“Did you catch what he said?”—until Dean returns with four spoons and a sponge cake drizzled in warm caramel sauce. The kids’ eyes go wide and Dean winks back.

By 1:00 A.M., the last satiated diners have sauntered out into the summer night. The chairs are stacked, the lights switched off, and the space is silent save for the purr of the wine refrigerators. Dean and Maya pull down the gate to the restaurant and walk past the noisy bars on Spring Street, past the weekend carousers stumbling on the Bowery, and head home to the Lower East Side. One can almost imagine that same path homeward about a century prior, when the neighborhood was the new home and refuge for hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. Every other block housed a synagogue or a Yiddish theater. Families would have been asleep, stacked like sardines, in the tenements. And the pushcarts that held the vegetables, meats, and pickles that so many of those families ate during their Sabbath dinners earlier that evening were tied up for the night in the quiet downtown streets.

Food as an expression of familial love is one of the oldest and most universal of concepts, although the contemporary interpretation of “comfort food” has seized American culinary culture with a tight grip. In a country composed of so many immigrants, cuisines once thought of as colloquial in their land of origin are transformed into something exotic in the new American kitchen. Traditional dishes have been reshaped—fused, deconstructed, tailored to the New World palate while remaining rooted in the flavors of their native countries. In New York, perhaps no beloved food transplant embodies this concept more than Jewish cuisine.

Jack’s Wife Freda, the pair of downtown cafés whose signs bear the illustrated face of their namesake grandma, is where Dean and Maya Jankelowitz have created a mecca of Jewish comfort-food dining. Both New York immigrants, they have managed to meld the Ashkenazi and Sephardic dishes of their respective childhoods with the twang and spices of South African and Israeli flavors. But the comforts of their restaurants aren’t limited to food. Something in their detailed coziness makes them worth queuing up for and inspires diners to linger after the plates are cleared. Consummate hospitality serves as the bedrock of their restaurants, and the communal, casual vibe feels oddly relaxed considering the flagship location is smack-dab in the middle of SoHo, one of the city’s most kinetic neighborhoods. But there is a sense of traveling home when eating at Jack’s Wife Freda, and it’s no mistake that the restaurants are named after Dean’s grandparents. Everyone has an origin story. Maya’s and Dean’s stories started some 6,000 miles apart and eventually converged in a love song to New York.

On a Friday afternoon in Killarney, a suburb of Johannesburg, the spring air carries the delicate honeyed perfume of the sugarbush, as the waning sun casts its last slanted rays of citrine warmth over the neighborhood. Inside Freda’s kitchen there are wafts of sweet challah baking, simmering matzo ball soup, the snap of chicken schnitzel frying. It’s the mid-eighties. We’re in South Africa, and Friday afternoon in this predominantly Jewish neighborhood means one thing: the coming of Shabbat. Freda’s ten-year-old grandson, Dean, is playing cards with his siblings in the living room and sneaking chocolates as family and friends gather by the minute. Freda emerges from the kitchen, her wig styled in a perfect bouffant and her arms covered in costume bangles, telling her husband, Jack, to fix her a cocktail. Their house fills with the raucous laughter of neighbors, arguments between cousins, and grandchildren shrieking as they play games in the yard. For some, hosting forty people any given night may be an overwhelming event, but for Jack and Freda it’s a normal Shabbat—a familial comedy of errors, a delicious feast.

As the country headed toward the end of apartheid, political and racial tensions were at a steady boil in South Africa. Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for nearly ten years by 1974, the year Dean was born, and apartheid wouldn’t officially be over until Dean was twenty and living in the United States. But those decades, which stand as one of the worst scourges of racial discrimination, were the backdrop to Dean’s upbringing in the very insular Jewish community in which he grew up. The circumstances that brought his family to South Africa date back to a mass Jewish migration from Lithuania beginning in the late nineteenth century in the wake of a massive gold rush. The Jewish population in South Africa had boomed from 4,000 to 40,000 by 1915. It was on the heels of this influx that fifteen-year-old Chaim Jankel, Dean’s grandfather, was sent by his parents from Lithuania to escape the mounting anti-Semitism in pre–World War II Europe.

In 1925 Chaim naturalized to South Africa, taking the name Jack Jankelowitz. He joined uncles and aunts who had already immigrated, but his parents stayed behind to care for his grandfather. On Yom Kippur in 1940, his parents, along with the entire Jewish community in the town of Kruk, were marched out of their synagogue and murdered in the streets by the Lithuanian Guard. The lucky ones in the Jankelowitz clan who had immigrated to America and South Africa were spared the ensuing Holocaust. Perhaps eclipsed by the tenuous race relations of their new home, the Jewish communities in South Africa avoided the tragic fate of their European counterparts. And it was here that Jack met his wife, Freda.

Freda was native to South Africa. Her father, Charlie, was a homeopathic doctor who had fled the pogroms in Poland for refuge in England. While in London, he quickly fell in love with and wed a cockney beauty, Annie. The two immigrated to Johannesburg, where they raised their three daughters—Freda being the baby by fifteen years. She was only seven when her father died, leaving her mother to take over the household. Annie prided herself on being a true “balaboosta”—the Yiddish term for an excellent homemaker—and after the death of her husband she supported her daughters by monetizing her talents, cooking and baking for the back-alley card games she regularly held at her house. It was her mother’s passion, and ease for entertaining, that Freda would, in time, lavish on her own family.

Jack and Freda married on January 5, 1942, in a huge celebration of family and friends during a warm South African summer. They raised two children, Anne (named for Freda’s mother) and Brian, in the tight-knit diaspora of “Jewburg,” and Brian and Anne would grow up to raise their families there as well.

Brian’s son Dean was the second oldest of four siblings, and when Dean was six, his parents divorced. Jack and Freda became secondary caregivers to their grandchildren, and for the kids, it meant lots of happy playtime at their grandparents’ home. Four young children can be a nightmare for a single working parent, but having a balaboosta for a mother is nothing short of a godsend. Freda would cook up a storm for her grandkids—cold borscht with sour cream, hot potato knaidlach, crispy chicken schnitzel, chicken soup with dill, chopped liver, chopped herring—the all-star lineup of Ashkenazi cooking. There was also ptcha (jellied calves feet), gribenes, tzimmes, and kishke (sausages stuffed with meat and matzo meal) from the Polish-Lithuanian Jewish tradition of making delicacies from the less desirable parts of the animal. In the face of scarcity, the flavors of Jewish cooking are marked with resourcefulness, love, and endurance. Jack would make potato latkes just like the ones his family had sold in Lithuania. Freda would fillet the sole as her mother had in London and bake her famous cheesecake, which never lasted long.

Freda was a quintessential housewife of the 1950s. Like her mother before her, she was uncompromising in the art of hosting and setting a lavishly welcoming table. She kept an impeccably stocked bar and bowls of treats and chocolate on every table. The quality and presentation of her glassware, silverware, and tablecloths were of the utmost importance, an impressive feat in 1980s South Africa. The United States and the United Kingdom had placed heavy trade sanctions on the country in an international protest of apartheid, so the simple act of making fried eggs with real butter, as Freda was known to do, was an extravagance. To Dean and his brothers and sisters, Jack and Freda’s home was the land of plenty. “I think all our safe time was in that house,” Dean remembers. “It was a very comforting place to be, filled with warmth and love and free of complication.” It was a place without rules and no one wanted for anything, the children ever in the embrace of their adoring grandparents.

Jack and Freda passed away within months of each other, shortly after planning Dean’s bar mitzvah. Their absence left a hole in the way of life for the family, knocking them out of their comforting routine. Meals were increasingly eaten outside the home or cooked by African maids, immersing the kids in the regional tastes of South African cuisine.

South African food is a curious amalgamation of flavors, the result of centuries of imperialist government. The country’s trade line through the Dutch East India Company brought various spices, such as nutmeg and curry from Malaysia. The influx of Indian labor in the nineteenth century came with chutneys and samosas. Mixed with both the native and supplanted agriculture, the result of these intermingling of flavors is robust, spicy, and never boring. Dean remembers the street food of his youth, the barbecued meaty boerewors sausages (from the Dutch, known as the Boerers, an Afrikaans word for farmer) flavored with coriander and nutmeg, the mieliepap served alongside (a maize-meal similar to polenta or grits—“pap” from the Dutch word for porridge—served in varying consistencies and made with sour milk). The maids cooked potjies (meat stews with potatoes and pumpkin) and the menu rotated from day to day: fish on Monday, chicken on Tuesday, meat on Friday, and so on.

Dean’s father, on the other hand, had a culinary repertoire that consisted of sandwiches and pasta. To his kids’ relief, that meant practically all meals were eaten out on the town. A fancy Portuguese restaurant was a favorite, and there were plenty of decent Greek joints as well, but no restaurant was as beloved by the kids as Nando’s. It was a casual restaurant with one very memorable specialty—peri peri chicken. Peri peri—or piri piri or pili pili—is the African bird’s-eye chili, and simply means “pepper pepper” in Swahili. Nando’s signature dish was butterflied grilled chicken slathered in a Portuguese-style peri peri sauce—ground chili peppers mixed with lemon juice and red bell peppers. The result was succulent, charred chicken with a spicy kick and just a tinge of sweetness to stave off the burning. The simmering warmth of dill in Freda’s chicken soup and the searing heat of the bird’s-eye chili, though not an obvious marriage, were influences that followed Dean across the Atlantic to New York in years to come.

Maya was born in upstate New York in 1978. The daughter of an Israeli mother and a Brooklyn-born father, she spent her youngest years moving up and down the northeastern United States, from New York to Delaware, from Philadelphia to New Jersey. But the connection to Israel was in the family genes. Her father, Michael, had immigrated (or “made aliyah,” meaning “to ascend” in Hebrew) to Herzliya with his family as a teenager after the establishment of the Jewish state. He met Aviva while serving in the military, and shortly thereafter, they moved back to the States, where they had their own children. For Maya’s family, their move back to the homeland, when she was eight years old, felt inevitable.

Like Dean, Maya’s paternal line of ancestry came from the Eastern European Ashkenazi sect. Her grandmother Anne Marie grew up in the Black Forest of southwestern Germany, the daughter of a successful cigar manufacturer. In 1936, before the onset of World War II, her parents were able to procure a single travel permit for sixteen-year-old Anne Marie to seek refuge in England. Five years later, penniless and estranged from her family, her rabbi introduced her to Irving, a Jewish-American Air Force reconnaissance photographer stationed in London. That same rabbi married them in 1945 once the war had ended, and three months later, Irving’s troop was sent back to the United States. For Anne Marie—as a German-born citizen—obtaining a visa to join her husband in America was nearly impossible during the aftermath of the war. Luckily for the newlyweds, Irving’s commander happened to be Elliot Roosevelt, son of the sitting president of the United States. With the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, Anne Marie was reunited with her husband via a ticket on a chartered ship to Brooklyn seven months later. Maya remembers Anne Marie much like Dean remembers his grandma Freda. She was a well-educated woman who spoke French, English, Spanish, and Hebrew. She had impeccable taste and a penchant for presentation, and cooked all the Ashkenazi specialties for her grandchildren.

Aviva’s parents were Sephardic Jews from Tripoli, Libya. They also made aliyah to Israel in the late 1940s when anti-Semitism in Tripoli peaked. Raphael and Buba (“doll” in Hebrew) were from large families and, in turn, made a large family of their own. Aviva was one of nine siblings. When Maya moved back to Israel as a child she was suddenly inundated by an enormous extended family, a welcome shock to the atomic family life she had been accustomed to in America. “In my memory, I grew up in very sterile Jewish community in a Jersey suburb,” she recalls. “And then all of a sudden there was this warm, big family in Israel. My grandparents’ home would be filled with uncles and aunts and about thirty cousins—and a lot of them were older so they had kids. The house was always filled with life, family, and food.”

The cooking that came out of Buba’s kitchen was as lavish as Freda’s but different in style. Sephardic Jews cook with the spice and flavor now broadly associated with Middle Eastern cuisine. Buba cooked shakshuka (a spicy baked egg dish in tomato sauce) and chreime (fish stew with lemon and chili pepper), with the earthy flavors of thyme, oregano, and sumac in the za’atar that got sprinkled on everything. Not unlike Dean’s memories of the mieliepap being prepared by the maids, Maya remembers, “Buba would make the couscous from scratch and there was a giant tub of it covered with towels that would sit overnight. And she was cooking for that whole family—around fifty people, with tables set up outside.”

The Mizrachim (Sephardic Jews, specifically from North Africa or the Middle East) in Maya’s family came from an old tradition of socializing that pivoted on family, community, and a dash of superstition. They considered themselves religious, though in a way that was more ritualistic than orthodox. They kept their house kosher according to Jewish tradition, but never required that their guests eat the same way. They observed Shabbat, but the television would be kept on—in case family were there who wanted to watch. Every quotidian event was a blessing or a curse, and either way, there was a passage from the Bible necessary to recite for protection: “The way they had of saying those mini blessings, and spitting out ‘Hamsa, hamsa, hamsa’ [akin to “knock on wood”—a Hebrew reference to the talisman that wards off the evil eye] made me feel safe. The grown-ups were always enforcing the good and shielding us from the evil.”

The culture shock to young Maya was as alluring as it was disorienting. Already eight years old, she hadn’t yet learned Hebrew, but deeply yearned to be part of its rich culture. She was surrounded by Israeli family and new Israeli friends but not quite Israeli herself. “I came from America where everything was shiny, packaged, and accessible. This was very different. It was the eighties in Israel. Israelis are so proud—they grew up with their foods, and markets, and kibbutzes, and their songs. I never felt like I fully belonged but I always wanted to. And I think being an outsider gave me this different perspective,” a perspective that would eventually lead her back to New York to claim her Israeli identity on different soil.

Before she took that leap, however, she had to navigate the squall of adolescence, nearly capsized by her parents’ divorce when she was seventeen. At that point in her life, itching to get away from the suburbs, she met her first boyfriend, a pilot in the Israeli air force. Maya was about to begin her own mandatory service and in the throes of first love, she found a trusted confidant and a glimpse at the world outside her family’s scope. “I moved into the apartment he rented—the cutest little apartment in the center of Tel Aviv. And that’s when I learned that there’s a world out there, and you can create your own world, and break your own pattern and start your own thing.” In Tel Aviv, Maya had the revelation that the electric pace and mottled diversity of city life suited her.

Maya survived her army service but her relationship did not. She moved into an apartment of her own and took short-lived gigs working in the service industry—behind the counter of a Burger Ranch, waiting tables at a Japanese restaurant run by Filipinos. Eventually she halfheartedly settled into a job at the airport but by then the initial luster of living in Tel Aviv had worn thin. She spent her hours daydreaming about the far-flung destinations stamped on the passports she saw every day. “Working in the airport, I always had this underlying hunger to escape: being around different people, tasting different cultures, this idea of going into the unknown.” With an aimless future weighing on her, she set her anxious eyes on a trip to the United States. It was an easy choice—her American passport would allow her to look for work—and though she was traveling alone she worked up the nerve to buy a round-trip ticket to New York.

Both Maya and Dean describe their rambling days getting situated in America similarly. Neither had any seed money nor a clue as to what they would do once they were here. Neither had close friends to show them the ropes. They had bought return tickets back to their home countries, but neither ended up using them. Dean kept the ticket folded in his wallet for years, a prized token of immigrant grit and autonomy.

Dressed in cutoffs and wearing a bandanna on his head, twenty-year-old Dean arrived in New York the summer of 1994. He dropped his bags off at the Harlem YMCA and sauntered downtown to Central Park. “My love affair with America was so huge—I grew up watching Dallas and The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond. And I remember there was a movie called The Prince of Central Park, about a kid who lived in the park. That was how I felt—very free. During apartheid we were so closed off to everything. So the more you see, the more you want to see.” Six years later, Maya had the same feeling of novelty and elation when she got off a plane on a very cold December night. “My best friend knew a guy we went to high school with who lived in Forest Hills, which sounded so magical to me. When I got off the plane, I took a train to a bus and just went there. It was winter and there were Christmas trees everywhere and I thought it was incredible. And then I arrived at this little one-bedroom apartment in Queens with four Israelis living there. But I felt so lucky!”

Like so many immigrants before them, Dean and Maya were initially buoyed up by strangers who had made the same journey. Maya was immediately hired by an Israeli at a retail store in SoHo. During her lunch break one day, she stumbled into the grand French brasserie Balthazar around the corner, entirely unaware of owner Keith McNally’s booming popularity in the New York restaurant scene. She was even more oblivious to the fact that she would meet her future husband, the father of her children, and her eventual business partner there. Coffee cup in hand, she surveyed the place and was impressed by its scale and affable charm. She inquired about a job, and they hired her as a hostess the following week.

Dean had a somewhat less linear journey. He lived at the YMCA for two months before he had burned through most of his cash, so he used a portion of his dwindling funds to book a flight to Houston, Texas, to stay with a South African uncle. An ill-advised three-day layover in Las Vegas succeeded in hammering the nail in his bank account’s coffin, “I remember getting off the plane and needing to call him and I didn’t have any money—I think I had two quarters. I had to call him collect from the airport to come get me.” In Houston, Dean set to work waiting tables—as he’d done since his teenage years—and lived with his uncle until he saved enough to go stay with a cousin in San Diego. A neighbor there hooked him up with a flight attendant job. He flew with a private airline between Los Angeles and New York and enjoyed being a fly on the wall when Bob Dole was on the presidential campaign trail, or while Norman Mailer quietly perused a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or when the Chicago Bulls packed the plane between games. Flying back and forth over the United States was exactly the kind of job that appealed to Dean, still unsure where to land. He stuck with it for two years before he felt the magnetism of New York pulling him back again.

Dean floated around the restaurant scene in the late ’90s. He was hired as a waiter at Pastis (Balthazar’s sister restaurant in the Meatpacking District) despite showing up on his first day of work with stitches in his chin and a black eye, remnants of his twenty-fifth birthday party, of which he remembers very little. It was perhaps the best kind of testament to the energy of downtown New York in that era. Bleecker Street was still lined with head shops and tattoo parlors below Washington Square Park. Antiques stores and first-edition bookshops were in the West Village. Magnolia Bakery was a quaint neighborhood cupcake place staffed by surly NYU students, and the Meatpacking District, though gentrifying rapidly, was still home to a bevy of nighttime characters, jazz musicians who played secret shows in derelict buildings, and the beautiful kaleidoscopic eccentrics who spilled out of the after-hours eatery Florent from dusk till dawn. It had the precise cultural intermingling that eventually causes a neighborhood to implode, pricing out the artistic inhabitants who have created it. But at that moment, it was also the reason why showing up with a busted chin wasn’t an employment deal-breaker for Dean.

By the autumn of 2001, life had been an exhilarating blur of a party for him, hopping between restaurant jobs and working on documentaries. All of that came to an abrupt halt on September 11. Dean had been living on Greenwich Street, a few blocks from the World Trade Center, for about two years. On that day his apartment building fell victim to the towers. “It was a disaster in my personal life. Everything just kind of crumbled. I was out and working and partying all the time, having a lot of fun in the city. And then all of a sudden I had no home the next day.” He moved in with his girlfriend and quit his job at Pastis, understandably favoring the tranquility of uptown compared to all he had lost downtown. The hiatus served its purpose of helping him to move on from the trauma and eventually stirring within him the urge to start anew. A year later he rented an apartment on the Lower East Side and called Keith McNally to ask for a job again. “Keith said, ‘Great, we’re opening this new place, Schiller’s, in a few months.’ And I said, ‘That sounds fantastic but I need a job, like, right now.’ And he said, ‘Well, fine. Go be a breakfast waiter at Balthazar.’ And I said, ‘That sounds amazing!’ And it was. Because that was where I met Maya.”

Four years after she left Israel and began working at Balthazar, Maya had carved out a charmed life for herself in the East Village, and though she could barely afford the $800 rent, she found support in friends, mentors, and an array of creatives struggling to make it on their own. She was assiduous, pulling five to six shifts a week at the restaurant, first as a hostess, then as a coat checker, a waiter, eventually moving up the ranks to maître d’—all while working her way through graphic design school at night. “I was just so happy to work, to create my own life—and I was good at it. I realized working in the service business, people had outside dreams or aspirations but I took the job really seriously and felt that I was part of something. There was always this distant thought that I was going to have to go back home—but the energy of downtown New York City made me feel something new, made me want to commit and stay. It was the first time I felt like my life was becoming my own. It felt like a miracle.” Though she had to consign old dresses in order to eat breakfast, and sell her paintings as “affordable art” for subway fare, this new independence liberated her. She had discovered a sense of self and place. “I was listening to music, taking pictures, and painting all day—I felt like an artist. And I have these memories of being lonely and broke and struggling—but now when I think about being in my twenties in the city, I think: I’m so lucky that I had that! I was all alone and had nothing, but it felt like so much. It was just like the whole world opened up.”

This was the Maya Dean immediately fell in love with when he took the job at Balthazar. His father testifies to getting a phone call from Dean saying, “I met my future wife. She’s Israeli. I’m too scared to go within four feet of her so I have to stay away.” For Maya, it took a bit longer to come around—partly due to the fact that Dean acted literally on his fear, standing four feet away from the hostess podium, performing elaborate pantomimes in hopes of getting her attention. Like some unhinged version of Buster Keaton, Dean would strut within her sight line, producing an imagined paintbrush out of his pressed floor-length apron. After a long drag off his pretend cigarette, he would furiously splatter color onto a make-believe canvas—a bizarre courtship charade in which Jackson Pollock wins Maya’s heart. “The Russian hostess next to me would say, ‘He’s so strange. Tell him to go away!’” She laughs in recollection. “I thought he was completely insane.”

Of course, Dean eventually bridged the four-foot gap and Maya discovered that she liked the weirdo. They met in Tompkins Square Park for their first date, amid the burnt-out hippies, downtown misfits, and tweaking junkies. A shambling jazz band provided the score. Dean texted Maya: Find me by the out-of-tune flute. To this day, he’ll text her the same thing when they’re looking for each other in a crowd. They talked until daybreak in her apartment. The following day Dean moved in with Maya and never left.

In retrospect, theirs is a love story that seems equal parts improbable and inevitable. The distances they had to travel to find each other, the circumstances that had to align, the discouraging example set by the failed marriages of their parents . . . and yet, Dean and Maya shared a deep understanding of what family meant to them. Their happiest memories were cemented by the love of strong family matriarchs, and both had still chosen to branch off from the security of their families in pursuit of their own selfhood.

Dean bought an engagement ring in January 2004, two days before his birthday. He liked the feeling of carrying it around in his pocket, not really sure how to propose or where to do it. He and Maya had a birthday lunch, as usual, at a Moroccan café where they ate half their meals. Dean slid the ring across the table, and they spent the rest of the day celebrating in a flurry of champagne and friends. Four months later they recited their vows in Jerusalem on a balcony overlooking the Western Wall, under a South African chuppah.

When Schiller’s Liquor Bar opened on the Lower East Side, it attracted the young, pretty downtown kids like flies to honey. It was an instant success with its sexy candlelit incandescence, the roar of patrons ping-ponging off the tiled walls. People stumbled down a staircase to the communal bathrooms, washing their hands at the center island trough—across which flirtatious glances nearly negated the act of hand cleaning. The let-down-your-hair, unbuttoned atmosphere was in no small part due to Dean’s orchestration. Under his management, regular customers were greeted by nicknames Dean made up, heralded by the round of applause he would initiate with, “So-and-so just entered the building, ladies and gentlemen!” He would send desserts with enormous sparklers ablaze to an unsuspecting birthday-less group of girls. He would send shots to single people sitting next to each other at the bar, shamelessly introducing them. He’d send a round of cheap tequila to noisy frat boys, knowing it would be easier to oust them if they thought of him as one of the brothers. In truth, everyone was dubbed “brother” by him, and it bred a communal party that made you want to laugh with strangers and spend whatever was in your wallet until he kicked you out at closing.

Maya wielded the same influence, albeit to a more grown-up crowd, at Balthazar. It was, and remains, an institution in the New York dining scene, known for its classic French café menu and attentive service. A varied set of celebrities, regulars, and tourists—all of whom had high standards and expectations—came through the door. Perhaps it’s the balaboosta in her bloodline, but Maya knew exactly how to read what a person needed in order to feel welcomed and accommodated. She knew that the mother with the stroller didn’t have patience to wait long for her kid to eat, so crayons appeared as soon as they were seated. She could sense that the surly European man coming straight from the airport needed a drink on the house to soften the wait for his reservation. For the highly visible fashion magazine editor, a favorite table had better be ready when she arrived. Like an expert tailor, every customer’s comfort measurements were different, but Maya could guess them at a glance with startling accuracy. Dean is well acquainted with these qualities in his wife: “Maya’s energy on the floor is the best in the city. Her care for customers and the staff is so deep, and that’s really all a restaurant is: caring for the people who work with you and the people who come inside.”

It is no wonder, then, that this couple with their respective instincts for hospitality would eventually come to open their own restaurant. When their first son, Noam, was born, both were struck with a sense of restlessness, and a feeling that they couldn’t keep working late shift hours with their baby at home. Once Noam was old enough to go to school, Dean would never see him if he was managing a bar all night. For Maya, too, there was an ache for a new maturity and evolution in their lives. “I remember when we had our two days off we loved to walk around, go to restaurants, the movies, the museums, dance and enjoy ourselves. We would just meander the neighborhoods and smoke cigarettes and love the city. And then we had the baby, and we were doing pretty much the same thing but pushing a stroller.” It took four years and a second pregnancy for them to take the leap to ownership, but during that time the idea had taken root and nagged at them. “When you look at the immigrant story from South Africa, people always had their own businesses,” Dean reflects. “They weren’t part of a huge commercial culture. You worked hard and you developed your own trade. It’s an immigrant feeling and it’s part of Jewish identity—there’s something about having your own business that has always felt truthful. Your name is who you are. This business is who we are.”

Noam’s little brother, Bennie, was born in the spring of 2011, and by early October Maya and Dean had signed a lease for their restaurant at 224 Lafayette Street.

With an infant and toddler in tow, they drew every last dollar out of their savings account to pay the key money for the business. They had forged countless friendships with fellow downtowners over the years, had expertise in the area’s varied customer base, and were emotionally invested in the community. In return, the whole neighborhood (and then some) eventually showed up to eat. At that point they still were not sure of the kind of restaurant they wanted to own, or what they would name it. “We were going to call it Alfred’s—for no reason. Because it looked polite or vanilla or buttoned-up or something.” Jack’s Wife Freda was a funny harebrained idea Dean had thrown around months earlier—one that was met with a great deal of outside resistance. “They said that no one would invest in a restaurant with that ridiculous name,” Maya said. But similar to the location, Freda’s name was synonymous with hospitality, and though Maya had never had the chance to meet her, she felt a strong connection with the balaboosta grandmother Dean held so dear. Jack’s Wife Freda had a ring of casual familiarity to it—the suggestion of eating in your grandparents’ or friend’s home—and it squared nicely with their sense of belonging in the SoHo neighborhood. “We thought the name was funny,” says Dean, “but it also had spiritual importance that was grounded in family. This idea with wine, terroir—where the soil, the sand, the sun, the love, the hill, the house—everything has a meaning in the taste of the wine. So once we had the name, it felt like everything found its purpose. And all the things we sourced for Lafayette came from within a mile of the place, whether it was the banquettes, the tables, the chairs, the lights. We were committing to the city and to our lives here. We loved the city so much and wanted to give back to it, to be part of it, and make our history part of it too.”

The three months before opening are remembered in a haze of construction, design, and fortitude. They pooled beloved friends and family together as investors. The laundry list of things to complete, orders to make, and banquettes to measure left little space for doubt. But the front of the house found its conceptual groove: an approachable café, the kind they had loved in Paris and Tel Aviv and in their favorite downtown restaurants. “We wanted a place with long hours, where you can sit and have a cup of coffee, where you’re welcome to celebrate your birthday or bring your family, and where there’s always a warm reception when you walk in.” They wanted to foster a sense of recognition among their guests—not demographically, but rather a sharing of sensibility and belonging, “a place where you feel like you’re part of something, of the neighborhood, of the background. The kind of place where you always know someone in the room. Maybe someone you’ve seen on the block or at another restaurant, or you worked with them, or a friend has. A familiar feeling—that you know you’re in the right place because there are like-minded people around.” These elements had gone into every detail of assembly, from the intimate three-seat marble bar to the kitschy porcelain koi fish sugar cups. Implausibly, there was one rather essential component to the restaurant that had not yet been settled: the menu.

Maya and Dean had been auditioning chefs for the job but nothing had stuck. The food they were tasting, though delicious, was off the mark—too fussy or pretty or ego-driven.

An Israeli baker friend had been present for the first series of unsuccessful tastings and heard their discomfort with the buttery food, the suggestion of bacon on the menu, the complicated recipes. She advised them to make a list of all the things they liked and to take it from there. Dean and Maya had been so at ease with the front of house that they had overestimated their ability to engineer what came out the kitchen. They sat down that night and began listing the foods that told their story. They talked about the croque madame they had on their honeymoon in Paris, the soft-boiled eggs they cracked together for breakfast, the fresh mint “Nana” teas they drank in sidewalk cafés in Tel Aviv. Dean called his brother and reminisced about the peri peri chicken and prego steak sandwiches at Nando’s. They added Grandma Freda’s matzo ball soup and her salads and sweetbreads. Maya wanted Buba’s couscous and shakshuka on the list. Together they filled the menu with the tastes that had nourished them in their childhoods and reminded them of the generosity of their families, flavors they wanted their two boys to grow up tasting. They were meals they had shared while traveling together and the food that had sustained them while falling in love with one another and the city. When they met Julia just two weeks before opening, Dean took this patchwork list out of his pocket and showed it to her. “She literally went down the list and said, ‘Great! I can do that, I can do that. Yes, I can make this for you!’ And that’s how the menu came along. Julia took everything we loved and made it make sense.”

Jack’s Wife Freda opened its doors on Friday, January 13, 2012. For Jews, the number 13 is lucky and Shabbat is holy, and as it turned out, that date brought all the holy luck they hoped it would. Soon glowing reviews were being written and photographs of the colorful food were widely circulated. Word of this restaurant with the funny name spread at a pace they could just barely keep up with. But sheer luck wasn’t enough. In truth, the lasting success of Jack’s Wife Freda was hard earned. The restaurant became a living, breathing thing—like a third child—one that needed constant care and attention. “When we opened, we were each like an octopus with eight arms doing it ourselves,” Maya recalls with angst. “Nothing just happened on its own and everything was important: the ripeness of the avocados, if the bathroom wasn’t cleaned, if the WiFi went down. Dean was hovering there like a hawk—waiting for a problem to arise so he could be there to fix it.” When the security gate broke at two o’clock in the morning, Dean sat out front waiting for someone to show up to fix it at five. During brunch, Maya greeted guests at the door with baby Bennie strapped to her chest. When the dishwasher broke midshift and none of the repair services showed, Dean rolled up his sleeves and washed plates alongside the kitchen staff.

But from the get-go, former coworkers and loyal friends showed up at Jack’s Wife Freda in droves, eager to pitch in and get things up and running. Trained in the same sensibilities as Maya and Dean, staff members worked in the trenches when they first got busy, and then became slammed. Their team still has that same multitasking gusto that was necessary in the early days; it’s not uncommon to find a manager taking orders, servers bussing and setting tables, or an expediter running food from inside the kitchen and picking up empty plates on the way back. Enthusiastic and inspired, it’s as if everyone in their battalion of employees grew the same set of octopus arms.

Regulars and neighbors started filling up the room with friendly faces from open to close. The fastidious French artist who lived upstairs was eating three meals a day at the restaurant, joined by her loft neighbor, a clean-cut Swiss single father and his five-year-old daughter drawing on the placemats. A handsome gray-haired man who Maya had introduced herself to on the street (months prior while collecting signatures for the community board) came to spend hours drinking rosé outside with his boyfriend, their Cavalier King Charles Spaniel waiting patiently by their feet. Here was the It Girl/DJ/clothing designer poring over e-mails while eating her grapefruit and yogurt. Installed at a corner table, sipping cappuccinos, a cane balanced on her lap, is the lady who taught art classes for the past three decades in the basement of the building next door. The brawny gym owners from around the corner ordered protein-heavy feasts of steak and whole branzino at 11:00 P.M. The dapper maître d’ from up the street came to the bar to chat with Maya while drinking a Negroni. They also befriended local artists who, in exchange for meals, donated artwork to fill the walls. The spirit of Freda traded in her twinkling costume jewelry and Elizabeth Taylor–esque bouffant for the likes of renowned painters in the downtown art scene, a graffiti artist, line drawings from a New Yorker cartoonist, and even one of Jack’s Wife Freda’s own waiters.

Within a year of opening, the restaurant was packed at any time of day. Maya and Dean had filled a niche in the neighborhood, a catchall of the true diversity of its streets; a comfortable, affordable, and congenial place where the food was unpretentious and the service was easy. That little café could hardly contain the following it garnered, so on its second anniversary they started to look for a second location. In December 2014, Jack’s Wife Freda had a twin sister at 50 Carmine Street in the West Village.

Today, a 7:00 A.M. staff meeting, scheduled ninety minutes before breakfast service begins, is the only quiet moment in the SoHo restaurant. “Hellos and good-byes are who we are,” Maya tells the servers for the hundredth time, as the puffy-eyed team sips coffee and nibbles quietly on the bagels and lox that Dean picked up the night before from Russ & Daughters. Some of the servers closed down the restaurant six hours earlier, while others are dressed in their striped-shirt uniforms with an eight-hour shift ahead of them. Remarkably, no one is cranky despite the early hour. “The door is an absolute priority for all of us,” adds Dean, picking up Maya’s sentence. “As always, we must remember to nurture our regulars and embrace the newbies. No one should ever come in here and feel we’re too busy for them. Be loose, confident, and generous in spirit.” Maya takes over for him, “And you guys know the drill: make sure the art is hanging straight and please keep an eye on things that need dusting.” The meeting continues like this for an hour, the owners reiterating the mantras of their successful formula. Julia describes a new dish they’re trying out on the menu called Maya’s Grain Bowl. The staff asks questions and discusses how best to handle the incident earlier in the week of a disgruntled neighbor, who pointedly rammed her bicycle into the crowd of people on the sidewalk waiting for brunch tables.

Outside, a tourist family of four peeks through the windows. Maya immediately gestures for them to come inside. They open the door halfway and shyly ask if they’ve come too early. “Hi! No, come on in!” exclaims Maya, as if ushering friends into her home. “We’re just finishing up our meeting, and the kitchen opens in thirty minutes. But sit—have some coffee! We also have bagels in the meantime.” Dean turns to the staff and recites a credo that applies as much to the servers’ shifts as it does to their philosophy of accommodation: “Remember: Early is on time.” And with that, the meeting is over. The staff disperses, some lingering to chat for a bit. The servers tie on their aprons, begin setting up the dining room, and fix tea for the first table of the day. As Dean and Maya head out to go to Carmine Street, the tourist family flags them over. “Please tell Jack and Freda that we say thank you for our breakfast!” “Of course,” they smile. The whole story is too long to tell in passing, but it is still deeply understood.

—Sarah Tihany