‘Not Just A Deli Like Any Other’

The gribenes and the p’tcha are still there, but can the Second Avenue Deli recapture the past?

by Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week

New York is a city of restaurants. More than 1,000 new eateries open every year in the Big Apple, which boasts a total of close to 18,000 dining establishments. Noshing is Sacred wonders, though, if any New York restaurant opening ever generated as much excitement, and as much media attention, as this week’s reopening of the Second Avenue Deli on Third Avenue and 33rd Street. Why is this particular deli considered to be so much a part of the fabric of New York? Is its food really that good?
David Sax thinks so. A journalist from Toronto, he is on a crusade to rescue the Jewish deli from extinction, and his Web site (www.savethedeli.com) chronicles his travels throughout North America and Europe. I joined him

last week at a pre-opening “friends and family” dinner at the deli.
“The Second Avenue wasn’t just a deli like any other,” he told me. “It served a broader range of the tradition. Yes, you could get a fantastic pastrami sandwich, but you could also get flanken, gribenes, kishka, kasha, chopped liver — all made from scratch.”
Sax recalled once interviewing Sharon Lebewohl, the daughter of the deli’s beloved founder, Abe Lebewohl, and the author, along with Rena Bulkin, of the popular “Second Avenue Deli Cookbook.” She told him that she used a whole chicken for every pot of soup, and that she prepared the chopped liver with real schmaltz (chicken fat).
By contrast, Sax noted, many delis cut costs by using pre-packaged and frozen products. He is especially impressed with the deli’s decision to continue making p’tcha (calf’s foot jelly), a dish that he has sampled in Jewish restaurants in London and Paris. It is almost never served at delis in North America.
The Second Avenue Deli seems to supply what Eric Asimov, writing a decade ago in The New York Times, called the “artisanal jolt” that he saw happening in breweries and bakeries; he felt that delis sorely needed a similar return to finely crafted, limited production in order to survive for a new generation.
A New York deli’s biggest challenge, according to Sax, is the outsized expectations of its customers. New York customers have what he called a “sense of connoisseurship mixed with a swagger. They have certain expectations about how a deli should look, the consistency of egg creams, the size of sandwiches and knishes.” If the new Second Avenue can satisfy those customers, he predicted, then “they’ve made it.”
Jeremy Lebewohl, the deli’s new owner, stopped by our table. (His father, Jack Lebewohl, took over the restaurant after his uncle Abe’s murder in 1996). Lebewohl pointed out that many of the deli’s customers are not Jewish.
“Today’s deli is more New York than Jewish,” Lebewohl asserted. “A Jew from Alabama is less of a deli expert than a Catholic or an Episcopalian from the Upper West Side.” Indeed, none of the cooks, most of whom have returned from the old deli, are Jewish. The p’tcha, for example, is prepared by a Jamaican chef, who grew up watching his mother make the same dish — except that she used pig’s feet.
Arthur Schwartz, who had a food show on radio station WOR for 13 years, has been writing a lot in recent years about New York Jewish food. His latest work, “Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited,” is due out in March.
Schwartz agreed that food “connects you to our history, and may in fact be the last remnant of your history that you give up.” But he said ruefully that the Second Avenue is virtually the sole survivor of a fragrant world of downtown Jewish food businesses, including Romanian steakhouses, kosher dairy restaurants and appetizing stores.
Can the Second Avenue bring back that world? Schwartz sounded dubious. He commented that ethnic food “has to change if you want it to seem the same” since we “enhance the actuality in our memory.”
Schwartz maintains that Jewish food has suffered greatly in quality over the last few decades, since Jews tend to eat their own food only on holidays — “and then we make everything we know, and then everyone gets sick.” In addition, he said, Jews often denigrate their own food, because it seems low class, unhealthy and less than fully Americanized. He especially lamented the “leaning down of American beef,” which he said has had an especially deleterious effect on brisket, the cut from which corned beef is made.
Still, the Second Avenue always aimed to please. Whenever he went to the Second Avenue, Schwartz recalled, he would never eat what they served the other customers. Instead, “Abe would get me something really fatty and juicy from the back.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization