Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

a look that would “chill every cell,” but I was unprepared for such Old Testament scorn. The stare was accompanied by absolute

*If you think the Puritans had problems, you don’t know from problems.

† Wide-ranging pejorative, from smarty-pants to bastard.

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silence, which was just as daunting, because everybody knows that a silent Jew is not a happy Jew. Finally, he spoke, his words cold and flat:

“Enjoy your meal.” His voice, devoid of inflection, knotted my kishkas.*

At the time of my visit, Ratner’s was about to close after ninety-five years as the Lower East Side’s high temple of the soothing kosher dairy lunch. Throughout most of the twentieth century, a meal at Ratner’s was an immutable Sunday tradition. Jewish shoppers would pick through the chozzerai† piled in the stalls along Orchard Street and then pour into Ratner’s, filling the 344 seats, even lining up along Delancey Street to wait their turn.

Neighborhoods change. The Jews have moved away, and the new-comers do not have a taste for baked vegetable cutlets, nor do they bring their children in for a nice glass of chocolate milk with whipped cream.

The passing of Ratner’s is heartbreaking, but to me it signals an event of even greater consequence—the end of the era of the professional Jewish waiter.

Once, they were innumerable, a multitude of Yiddish-speaking men who came off the boats from Europe and helped feed tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants with big appetites and little English.

Only Jewish waiters understood such delicacies as broiled kippered herring.‡ Only they could properly pronounce knish.§ They became fixtures at waiter-service delicatessens and Eastern European–style restaurants that flourished in New York from the early twentieth century into the 1970s.

Ratner’s waiters, many of them on the job for most of their lives, became legendary, more famous than Ratner’s cuisine. They were emo-

*The human intestine, but also a culinary oddity, a Jewish beef sausage made with so much filler it tastes like beef-flavored breakfast cereal.

† Technically, junk, although everybody but me always found wonderful bargains on the Lower East Side.

‡ Dried, cured, smoked, darkened fish that has much in common, aesthetically, with the dead, bloated seafood found in evaporated tide pools.

§ A small, heavy, overly romanticized pastry at its worst when filled with buck -

wheat groats.

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tionally complex and disturbingly moody, tormented by a belief that they had more promise, more dignity, and more intelligence than their profession deserved. When I took the F train down there, it was to pay my respects to them, not to eat, although I figured that while I was in the neighborhood, it couldn’t hurt to have a little something.

I helped myself to a few of the incredibly fresh and fluffy onion rolls, then ordered a plate of the famous cheese blintzes, which tasted awfully un-Jewish to me—the thin crêpe wrappers were reminiscent of Amish funnel cakes.* The person serving me was a young, dark-skinned, exceedingly gracious Ethiopian Jew who told me she was the first woman hired to wait tables at Ratner’s. When I mentioned that the elderly waiter working in her section seemed more in the classic Jewish mold, she called him over to meet me. I was trying to act like a mensch,† pay my respects, but I thoughtlessly offended him. I forgot that a Jewish waiter without thin skin is like a latke without apple sauce.

Back in the early to middle twentieth century, quite a few decades before anybody was discussing food trends, or even, for that matter, food, everybody who was Jewish talked about Jewish waiters. Dining out came down to this: you couldn’t live with them, and you couldn’t get a tongue sandwich without them. My father, who is eighty-six and started eating blintzes at Ratner’s in the 1930s, remembers the waiters as “a sour bunch of people who walked around with towels under their armpits, and then they’d use those towels to clean the tables.” When I argued with him that they couldn’t all have been that way, his answer was, “I remember it so clearly because we’d talk about it all the time. They’d been working there ninety years, and none of those ninety years was any good.” Jewish waiters didn’t just pick on Jews. They were nonsectarian, sparing nobody. In January 1961, as reported in The New Yorker, the

*I could have expressed my displeasure by crying out, “This is a blintz?”— the question-that-is-not-a-question being among the most devastating forms of Yiddish-style criticism.

† A fine fellow, although a step down in the Jewish pecking order from “a real mensch.”

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great British actress Dame Edith Evans, then in her early seventies, was taken to lunch at Ratner’s. She asked for pancakes.

“Blintzes,” the waiter replied. “What kind?”

“What kind do you have?” Dame Edith asked?

“If I told you, would you remember?” the waiter snapped back.

Ronnie Dragoon, who owns a chain of nine Ben’s delicatessens in the New York area, recalls that the era of the Jewish waiter was already coming to an end when he entered the business in 1972. While he never appreciated their overt crankiness, he admits “they created a certain ambiance that’s missing today.” Bob Stein, an owner of Eppes Essen in Livingston, New Jersey, says, “They may not have been the greatest waiters who ever lived, but they had a feel for what the customers wanted, and they had an answer for everything.” I always cherished them, no matter how disdainfully I was treated, because they were a comforting connection to my Jewish heritage. I knew that if I could somehow get off to a good start with them, which was no cinch, I was in for an unrivaled dining experience, one that incorporated traditional food and bad jokes.* If you ate what they told you to eat—and you risked hard