An Illustrated Love Song to Jewish Restaurants of Old

Amarante

Mon, Mar 16 2020, 2:21 pm

What more fitting forum for a book on the wonders of the dairy restaurant

I think I will curl up with it as I practice social distance. Smile

An Illustrated Love Song to Jewish Restaurants of Old

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 it into the communal jar of horseradish. He reports: “The bitter flavor reminded me of the suffering of my ancestors.”

This is a forlorn book, somehow. You wish it came with a good mixed bread basket, for mopping up the lonely broth.

The best story Katchor tells may be the one that takes place at B&H Dairy on Second Avenue, which opened in the 1930s and is still around. “One evening, in 1981, a woman happened to sit on the one empty stool at the counter next to mine and asked me what I was eating (it was a plate of gefilte fish),” he writes. “We left together to take a walk and several years later got married.”

Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner.
The Dairy Restaurant
By Ben Katchor
Illustrated. 496 pages. Nextbook/Schocken. $29.95. Smile