Jewish Deli. What's Your Response?

Can the Jewish Deli Be Reformed?

...New delis, with small menus, passionate owners and excellent pickles and pastrami, are rising up and rewriting the menu of the traditional Jewish deli, saying that it must change, or die. For some of them, the main drawback is the food itself, not its ideological underpinnings.

So, places like the three-month-old Mile End in Brooklyn; Caplansky’s in Toronto; Kenny & Zuke’s in Portland, Ore.; and Neal’s Deli in Carrboro, N.C., have responded to the low standard of most deli food — huge sandwiches of indifferent meat, watery chicken soup and menus thick with shtick — by moving toward delicious handmade food with good ingredients served with respect for past and present.

...These new deli owners are bringing a high set of culinary standards to once-plebeian food. They are mashing local potatoes to make peppery hand-wrapped knishes; holding tastings to determine the most savory fat for chopped liver (Mr. Gordon says that butter, the nonkosher choice, tastes best); and even brewing zippy homemade celery tonic — to reduce the carbon footprint, to save on the shipping from Brooklyn and because it simply tastes more like tradition.

...These cooks are fighting — independently, but with similar weapons of salt, smoke and fat — to rescue the Jewish deli, an institution that has been deteriorating in numbers and quality for decades.

“The old-school places are closing faster than I can write about them” said David Sax, the author of “Save the Deli,” a 2009 history of, and guide to, the remaining authentic Jewish delis in North America.

By today’s standards, the classic deli’s food is strikingly unhealthful, its vast menu financially unmanageable and its ingredients no longer in tune with the seasonal products of local farmers. Too many shortcuts are taken: sourdough bread instead of rye, prepared blintzes, lax lox.

...If anything can save the deli single-handedly, it’s pastrami. A Romanian-Jewish-American hybrid of barbecue, basturma (Turkish dried, spiced meat) and corned beef, it is loved by pit masters, salumieri and chefs alike...Pastrami, traditionally made from a fatty cut of beef belly called the navel, is not easy to master. It must be brined for days or even weeks, rubbed, smoked, steamed and sliced at the peak of juiciness. The seasonings — coriander, black pepper, salt, sugar, sometimes cumin or fennel seed — must sing in harmony. At each step, attentiveness is required: to the shape of the piece, its fat content and the tendons that run through it. Great slicers have become the stuff of legend: Katz’s and Langer’s, in Los Angeles, are among the only old-school delis that do it by hand. Some feel strongly that the slices should be thick; others, cold-cut thin.

All this means that pastrami fits right into two major contemporary food cults: traditional cured meats and barbecue. Modern cooks are so enamored of meat that even those with no particular connection to delis — like Tom Mylan, of the Meat Hook in Brooklyn; Elizabeth Falkner, of Orson in San Francisco; and Amorette Casaus, of Ardesia in Midtown — now make their own small-batch versions...

Delicious Delis

I was bar-mitzvahed in 1960, so I guess that means I grew up in the 60s.

Why do I mention that?

The Jews who immigrated here during the first half of the last century ate at delis — most of them kosher — regularly. Eventually they moved to the suburbs and traded salami for salad. In the 1960s there were 300 kosher delis in the city and suburbs and a Greater New York Delicatessen Dealers’ Association. That group is long defunct, and you can count the number of marquee delis left in Manhattan on one hand: Carnegie, Katz’s and Stage, none of them kosher.

Source

And a great quotation:

Richard F. Shepard used to say, “I love Jewish food, but when you eat it, 72 hours later you’re hungry again.”

The story is mainly about the reopening of the legendary Second Avenue Deli and one of the guys behind it:

Jeremy Lebewohl has a buzz cut and deep-set blue eyes. He’s pleasant and self-effacing, but he can be a tough guy too. Even though he attended Ramaz, a yeshiva on the Upper East Side, his roots on Avenue A shine through. He’s wired — talks fast, walks fast, sizes up a situation fast and looks willing and able to sling a barrel of corned beef at a moment’s notice. Yet there is a sweetness, especially in his bond with his father, that is unexpected and welcome. “My father always said I had no tush,” he told me, laughing. “I could never sit still.”

We talked at Jeremy’s apartment on the Lower East Side. Last year he married Ariella Vago, whom he met at Ramaz. We discussed his stint in the Israeli Army, where he served nearly two years in a combat unit before returning to N.Y.U. It’s certainly rare to find an American willing to trade a cushy college for the Israeli-Lebanese border.

“I went in the summer of ’02,” he said. “I think it was a combination of my own Zionism and the effect that being in New York on Sept. 11 had on me. I’d been to Israel before as the American tourist. Every single person who lives there goes to the army; I would go for vacation, then say, ‘O.K., time to leave.’ So I felt that joining the army was me putting in my share.” He also served in Bethlehem and Hebron. “It was a phenomenal experience,” he said. “But I never talk politics because left, right, it doesn’t make a difference. Nobody should be a victim of terror, period.”

Good man. Good Jew.

And I really enjoyed delis.

That's All, Folks

Alan Dell, owner of Katz’s Delicatessen, a legendary restaurant on East Houston Street that opened in 1888, spoke next.

Mr. Dell talked about changing food tastes. When Katz’s was founded, corned beef, pastrami and tongue were the mainstays of the Jewish deli. “There was no such thing as a turkey sandwich in those days,” he said.

Once, Mr. Dell said, there were more than 500 true Jewish delis in Manhattan alone, Mr. Dell said. Now, there are but “a small handful.”

Mr. Dell explained why Katz’s has a sign that says, “Katz’s, That’s All.”

“This sign originated when Benny Katz hired the signmaker to make the sign,” Mr. Dell said. “The signmaker asked, ‘Well, what exactly do you want to have it say?’ and Benny said to the signmaker, ‘Katz’s, that’s all.’ Sure enough he painted that on the sign!”