In a Super Bowl commercial in February that reprised their epic scene in When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan sat at a restaurant table across from Billy Crystal, her co-star in the 1989 film, and claimed to improve her meat sandwich by spritzing mayonnaise on it.
Mayonnaise, Meg? How could you?
Thankfully, the commercial got this right: The spot was filmed where the movie scene had been shot, at Katz’s Delicatessen, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
At least that establishment, founded more than a century ago, is still around and thriving. But Katz’s Delicatessen remains an anomaly. With the generation of immigrant Jews — those who established and first patronized such restaurants in most major North American cities — and the majority of their children having died out, and with assimilation taking its toll, far fewer delis remain to offer up corned beef and pastrami sandwiches on rye with brown mustard (I’m looking at you, Meg), hot dogs on buns with sauerkraut, kishke, gribbenes, potato knishes, schmaltz, matzo ball soup, sour pickles and other East European delicacies.
Delis that remain trade on modern patrons’ appreciation for the nostalgia, stories, aromas and tastes lovingly passed down to them. A deli was “a social hub, a place to go to be with other Jews,” said cookbook author Shannon Sarna Goldberg. “It was a cultural gathering place.”
Eating at Yitz’s Delicatessen as a boy in Toronto meant experiencing, along with the food, “a transformative, immersive atmosphere,” said David Sax, a freelance journalist and city resident who in 2009 wrote the book Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen.
Yitz’s, which closed in 2019, “wasn’t just another restaurant; it was a full sensory experience,” he said. “It’s a Jewish environment … that’s hard to replicate. It’s that atmosphere, that calm, that ta’am, that soulful flavor.”
In the United States and Canada, anyway.
But what kind of ferkakte world do we live in, that in the only Jewish state on the planet – even with its significant Ashkenazi population – delis and deli food were never a thing?
Joan Nathan, the acclaimed, Washington, D.C.-based cookbook author, explained it thus: that the Zionist pioneers reaching the Land of Israel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to work the land created not only a new Jew, but new Jewish food. The Middle East’s intense heat and paucity of fleshy cows suitable for beef meant that vegetables and legumes and salads became staples of the updated Jewish diet and that red meat was de-emphasized in favor of poultry — consumption habits Israel continues today.
The situation, though, inclines to the absurd. An American immigrant shopping in an Israeli supermarket is rightfully incensed upon gleefully reaching for a package of sliced meat labeled “pastrami” only to realize at first glance what it is: turkey. No marketing doublespeak — honey-roasted pastrami or barbecue-flavored pastrami — can mislead us. Deli 101: If it lacks beef and some fat, and if garlic’s scent doesn’t burst through the plastic wrapping, it’s not pastrami.
In a country emphasizing lighter fare than in eastern Europe, meat-heavy meals “just didn’t fit,” said Nathan, who lived in Jerusalem in the early 1970s and whose cookbooks include Foods of Israel Today and The Flavor of Jerusalem.
In a recent phone interview for this article, Nathan also cited Israeli author Amos Elon’s book The Israelis: Founders and Sons in explaining early kibbutzniks’ living off the land’s bounty in informal meals rather than digging into labor-intensive main dishes.
“On the kibbutz, you threw food on the table,” Nathan said. “It was totally different from the table-centered, heavy cuisine” they’d left behind in Europe, she said.
Nuts to that, I thought upon entering Sender, a tiny, 28-seat restaurant on Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Street. I craved a deliciously carnivorous trip back in time to when my parents took me to Pastrami King and Ben’s Best, delectable delicatessens in Queens, N.Y., that are no more.
So it was on a gloomy winter’s afternoon that Sender’s manager, Yael Shriber, placed on my table a bowl of chicken soup with kreplach and individual saucers of chopped liver — “You can’t eat it with a fork! You have to spread it on rye bread!” Shriber sweetly castigated — egg salad, gefilte fish with red horseradish, and chopped pickles. All except the bread were homemade, a source of pride for Shriber, whose husband’s Holocaust-survivor parents founded the restaurant in 1948.
Everything was tasty, comforting and oozing culinary love. Then there were the menu’s delicacies she didn’t dish up that I wished I could order, too: tzimmes, kasha, stuffed peppers, herring with tomato, goulash, tongue, cholent and fruit compote. What my late Grandma Rozzie, who periodically fantasized about her immigrant mother’s p’tcha, pickled cow feet, would’ve given to pull up a chair here, I thought. And how my father Norman of blessed memory would’ve devoured the sliced tongue and brought along a can of Dr. Brown’s cel-ray soda to wash it down.
“You see people, everyday, shedding tears” while eating, Shriber said of her customers — and journalists, too, no doubt, judging by the framed reviews and feature stories filling most of the limited wall space.
“It reminds them of good things. It’s the smell of home. … This food is authentic.”
So much so that Shlomo Pivko said the spread he orders most weeks from Sender for a post-prayers Shabbat kiddush draws worshipers to Tel Aviv’s Great Synagogue, of which he is president.
“We want people not just to come for the services, but for the Judaism,” he said.
Judaism, apparently, means food. The man talks sense.
Pivko had just polished off a plate of chopped liver and gefilte fish with horseradish. His patronizing the place, Pivko explained, honors his late father, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, who worked as a mover and favored a Sender lunch of chicken soup, chopped liver, herring and bread.
“When I order [from the restaurant],” Pivko said, “it takes me back to when I’d eat here with my father.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at hk@HillelTheScribeCommunications.com.
