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

his job to make sure the customers were treated right. He tells me the things he used to say to her he wouldn’t say anymore, but just to be certain I know he hasn’t become a pushover, he adds, “Maybe I was that way because circumstances warranted.” The professional Jewish waiter was as much an American original as the workingman who drove herds of cattle, laid railroad tracks, built skyscrapers. He just moved a lot slower. Bobby Trager, the chef of Nate

’n’ Al’s delicatessen in Beverly Hills, recalls frequent visits to Ratner’s with his grandmother, who would always buy him the vegetarian chopped liver he loved. “No waiters ever walked like them,” he says.

“They walked like they were old, even when they were twenty-five. It was almost like they had a walker, but they didn’t have a walker.” To my friend Shindler, Jewish waiters were the American equivalent of the imperious Paris waiters who looked down at all who came to their tables, although he points out that “the French waiters smelled of truffles and the Jewish waiters of schmaltz.”* Their motives, of course, were different. The French waiter utilized his sneer to emphasize the superiority of his national cuisine, while the Jewish waiter was only letting you know that his soul was suffering, to say nothing of his feet. “You know,” says Marvin Saul, seventy-one, owner of Junior’s in Los Angeles, “Jewish feet are not great feet for being waiters and waitresses. They got bunions. They got flat feet.” Adds Seymour Altman, seventy-four, owner of Altman’s Delicatessen in Baltimore, “I can

*Rendered chicken fat, an essential dietary component for any male wishing to achieve the Jewish masculine ideal of 250 pounds weight and 250 milligrams cholesterol.

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picture today how they schluffed* their feet, like they had weights on them.”

The professional Jewish waiter was not a pretty sight. He was often short, balding, and bent over. He did not introduce himself, but if you were seated at one of his tables often enough, you would get to know him by name, and he would get to know the food you preferred. He was neither impersonal nor polite, as servers are today. He wasn’t quite a Renaissance man, but he was, in his own way, well-rounded. He often fancied himself a playwright, a songwriter, and a gambler; that he was unsuccessful at all three endeavors did not diminish his self-esteem.

He suffered, and not silently, for the horses that ran slow, and for the artistic works he created that remained unpublished or unsung.

Jack Lebewohl, an owner of the Second Avenue Deli in Manhattan, remembers the illegal second-floor poker parlors that flourished along Allen Street on the Lower East Side, set up to attract Jewish waiters.

“They were called goulash joints, because they got goulash for free while they were playing cards,” he says. “In Las Vegas and Atlantic City you get free drinks, but in the Jewish gambling houses it was free food.” Larry Leiter, one of the owners of Moishe’s in Montreal, recalls one Jewish waiter who had other vices between shifts. “He’d work lunch, walk downtown, find a broad, take her out for a drink, be back at five-thirty for the dinner shift, work the night shift, go out and party. And he was no young man, either. He was doing it up to the end, and when he left here he was seventy years old. A Romeo, and his wife never knew.” Today, there are still Jewish waiters, but most work part-time. They don’t go to the track. They go to graduate school. Moishe Teitelbaum, thirty-three, owns a tiny kosher dairy restaurant, Matamim, in Brooklyn, that has no old Jewish waiters. He says, regretfully, “Waiters like that don’t have any value to the new generation. The new Jewish waiters are all strictly business. They get what you want; they bring it with a smile; they get their money and their tip. Nobody wants the old waiters,

*A deliberate form of locomotion commonly seen on Mississippi work farms where prisoners are restrained by ball and chain.

F O R K I T O V E R

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the ones who would talk with the customers about their grandmother’s recipe for matzo-ball soup. Nobody has time. The young Jewish customers have cell phones, beepers, and two or three jobs.”

“The young Jewish guy of today, he’s above this kind of work,” says Norman Moss, seventy-five, who was born on the Lower East Side and is the oldest professional Jewish waiter I could find. “He’s more educated, travels more, and he’s into the twenty-first century, which does not include waitering anymore.” Moss has been at the Stage Deli in Manhattan for about a quarter-century, pretty good for a man who has always thought of himself as an entrepreneur, not a waiter. Before coming to the Stage, he owned a Chock Full o’ Nuts restaurant, an ill-fated franchise operation created by a pre-Starbucks coffee company.

The specialty of the house was cream cheese on date-nut bread.

From this he made a living? He did not. After that unsuccessful endeavor, he came to the Stage, where he credits his success to attentive service. He doesn’t say he was the best Jewish waiter he ever saw. That would be Max Silver, now retired to Florida, who took such good care of regulars that whenever one of them asked for raisin-pumpernickel bread, which the Stage never offered, Silver would go into the kitchen with a handful of raisins and press them into the pumpernickel.

“I’ve seen a couple waiters here, they believe if you put down a pastrami sandwich and a Dr. Brown’s cream soda and send out the check, that’s the job. But there’s more to it than that.

Keep an eye out, extend yourself, and hope for a decent tip.” He’s not sure how long he will remain a waiter, because he and an associate have plans. They’ve invested in a website