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(I ate at one of these Jewish dairy restaurants in the 1960s and didn't
care for it much. The vegetables were overcooked. What I do miss are the
Jewish delicatessens which were almost as ubiquitous as pizza parlors
are today. Their owners all died off and their kids became accountants,
doctors and professors.)
NY Times, March 17, 2020
An Illustrated Love Song to Jewish Restaurants of Old
By Dwight Garner
The Dairy Restaurant
By Ben Katchor
Illustrated. 496 pages. Nextbook/Schocken. $29.95.
In his memoir, “Lucky Bruce,” Bruce Jay Friedman gave three reasons why
there are relatively few Jewish junkies: 1) “Jews need eight hours of
sleep.” 2) “They must have fresh orange juice in the morning.” 3) “They
have to read the entire New York Times.”
In his obsessive, melancholy and hungry-making new book, “The Dairy
Restaurant,” the writer and illustrator Ben Katchor suggests that orange
juice is hardly the primal elixir of the Jewish diaspora. About New York
City at the end of the 19th century, he writes: “For the poorest Jews of
the Lower East Side, healthful affordable milk was a taste of paradise.”
Katchor’s new book is a study of, and love song to, the American dairy
restaurant and the development of the expressive “milekhdike,” or dairy,
personality (consider Zero Mostel sighing over a platter of blintzes).
Dairy restaurants began to flourish in New York City and elsewhere in
the late 1800s; a century later, nearly all were defunct.
Katchor offers multiple descriptions of this cuisine, and prints
delectable old menu cards. He derives an early description of the food
from the writing of Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), whose short stories
about Tevye the Dairyman were the basis for the musical “Fiddler on the
Roof.” “The stories remind us of the wide range of dairy dishes,”
Katchor writes. “The potato knishes, the milkhiker borscht, the cheese
kreplekh, the varnishkes, the pirogen, blintzes, buttermilk, and for
dessert pudding and poppy cakes — the food of a Jew’s pastoral dream.”
This is an encyclopedic book, history as told through old newspapers and
telephone books and scraps of detail found in letters and memoirs. These
restaurants have mostly disappeared without a trace. Katchor establishes
their existence through ephemera like a single recovered matchbook or a
postcard found on eBay or a sugar cube with a printed wrapper that
someone thought to save.
This dense cultural and culinary history is reason enough to come to
“The Dairy Restaurant.” But Katchor, who made his name in the 1990s with
his weekly comic strip “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer,” and has
won a MacArthur fellowship, has a sharp mind and a sly sense of humor.
His words and his charcoal-palette drawings have a combinatory intelligence.
He starts at the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, which he considers to
be, in its way, the first restaurant. In Adam and Eve covering their
nakedness with palm fronds, Katchor sees “the first account of dressing
for dinner.” He charts in Eden the first indirect lighting, the first
mixed drink, the first recorded instance of a couple splitting a dish.
When Adam and Eve stray from the menu, they are cast out of the
establishment.
The Garden of Eden set the model for our present condition, Katchor
suggests. “The course of human life is no more, or less, altered every
day in countless restaurants and cafes, by people ordering the ‘wrong’
things, waiters and bouncers waiting to do their job, and owners looking
on with a mixture of motherly love and proprietary scorn.”
This book continues though the tangled rabbinical debates about the
Torah and dietary laws, and the Orthodox Jewish dietary restrictions
that separated meat from dairy. Thanks to the vicissitudes of history,
Katchor writes, “exile and travel were defining aspects of Jewish life,”
and “somewhere a Jew was always eating out.”
The thrice-scrubbed look of dairy restaurants, with their glazed white
tile, was distinctive — modern, healthy, optimistic, shorn of old-world
associations. These sanitary interiors were borrowed from those of
milking houses. Health and good digestion were seemingly on offer. About
dairy restaurants in midtown Manhattan during the middle of the last
century, Katchor writes: “Homesick Jewish businessmen with peptic ulcers
were the perfect customers.”
Many of the best moments in this book are stray gleanings. Katchor
writes, for example, about the two months Leon Trotsky spent in New York
City in 1917. Trotsky was a vegetarian who ate most of his meals in
Jewish dairy restaurants, his favorite being the Triangle Dairy in the
Bronx. Katchor notes: “He refused to tip, considering it an insult to
the dignity of the waiters, and the waiters retaliated with poor
service, accidental spillings of hot soup and insults.”
Katchor investigates the eating habits of Edward G. Robinson, Franz
Kafka and Emma Goldman. He packs avid indoorsmen like Theodore Bikel,
Arthur Miller, Bert Lahr and the staff of the Partisan Review into the
various iterations of Ratner’s, where Frank Zappa, Leonard Bernstein and
members of the band Chicago also shared a meal. Zappa tasted gefilte
fish for the first time and pronounced it “pretty good.”
During the McCarthy era, blacklisted screenwriters, their souls
strengthened on sorrow, met at Steinberg’s, scenes memorably recreated
in Martin Ritt’s movie “The Front.” They were trying to recover through
food what they had lost by circumstance. Katchor notes how, in the
1970s, the editorial staff of Screw magazine were regulars at the Palm
Tree Dairy on Broadway near 17th Street.
What happened to these restaurants? Katchor puts one part of their fate
bluntly: “Six million people with a taste for the Eastern European dairy
dishes mentioned in this book were murdered in Europe during World War
II.” A great deal of memory, and a vast number of potential emigrants,
were wiped out. He also blames high rents, worries about elevated
cholesterol and some cultural embarrassment. He adds: “With access to
the world’s cuisine, in all its glorious variety, what chance does a
plate of egg noodles and farmer’s cheese have?”
There is a moving memoirish aspect to “The Dairy Restaurant.” A
perambulator, Katchor has always been expert at capturing the texture
and sociology of vanishing aspects of city life. Here he also shares his
memories of restaurants he mostly visited in the ’80s and ’90s, when
they were in sharp decline. At a restaurant called the Famous Dairy, he
ordered a “wonderful” gefilte fish and dipped into the communal jar of
horseradish. He reports: “The bitter flavor reminded me of the suffering
of my ancestors.”
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