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

with the name zygesunt.com, * a sure moneymaker. “I’m into the twenty-first century,” he says.

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*Zy gesunt: A sweet old Yiddish farewell, meaning “Stay healthy.” Bill Gates should live to be a hundred, he would never think up this website.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

To understand what made Jewish waiters so unhappy, it’s necessary to grasp this fact: in his heart, no Jew is a servant of another. The Bible is filled with stories of the rich and powerful who thought they could sub-jugate the Jews, only to find out otherwise.* The Jewish waiter may have schlepped† between kitchen and dining room, but inwardly he knew he was destined for greater accomplishments. He was undereducated, which he regretted, because Jews revere the scholarly. He was relatively poor, which was a tragedy, because all around him Jews were becoming big shots.

For an answer to the pain this must have caused, I turned to Jackie Mason, comedian and verbal historian of Jewish folkways. He told me,

“Jews always feel they have to get somewhere, and the waiters came here without an education and resented that they had to adjust. Gentiles felt it was okay to be working class, but Jews to this day come to this country, have to stand out, become somebody important, not just a working stiff.

“They were independent characters who had to be waiters, and they adjusted, but they resented their jobs, and they were left with hostility and frustrations and humor laced with a little venom. They convinced themselves that the whole world stunk, and so that it didn’t stink all by itself, they took it out on the customers. They were sure the restaurants weren’t what they once were and customers weren’t what they once were and nothing was like it once was. They adjusted, tried to make a comedy out of their jobs, translate their lives into vaudeville acts. It was their only outlet, but if that didn’t work, they took it out on their customers.”

If the professional Jewish waiter became the master of contrarian service, then much of his behavior could be traced to the customers he was required to satisfy. “The people made them that way,” says Morris

*God to Pharaoh, biblical oppressor of the Jews: “Have some boils. Wear them in good health.”

† To move at minimum speed over a modest distance while uttering maximum complaints.

F O R K I T O V E R

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Breitbart, seventy-eight, a manager at Ratner’s for fifty-one years. Seymour Paley, seventy, owner of Corky’s, a Jewish-style restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, agrees. “Who can take the Jewish customers?” he asks.

Harry Rasp, owner of the restaurant Essex on Coney in Brooklyn, agrees.

“The trouble with the Jewish customer is that the restaurant is only as good as the last meal he had. He has no memory of the previous five hundred good ones. If the last one was not so good, I hear, ‘Harry, you’re not running it the way you used to.’ ”

“It was the customers,” says Joseph Weingarten, sixty, when I ask him why he left the Concord, one of the greatest of the Jewish resorts in the Catskills. “The chutzpah, the attitude. Always, it was the fardreyen kop. ”*

Currently a waiter at New York’s Smith & Wollensky steak house, Weingarten was born in Romania and came to America in 1959. His first job was waiting at Grossinger’s, the snootiest of the Catskills resorts, and then he moved to the Concord, where he stayed for twelve years. A top waiter like him would be responsible for thirty to fifty customers at each seating, all of them demanding immediate attention. After all, they were paying thirty dollars a day for room, entertainment, activities, and three meals.

“The food was tremendous,” he says. “Fourteen different juices, twenty different eggs, pancakes, waffles with vanilla ice cream, cheeses, fishes. How much could you eat? And they complained—oh, my God, they complained. It was amazing, and it broke my heart, because I came from World War II. I ate mama-liga† during the Russian occupation, 1945 to 1949, until I went to Israel, in 1950.

“The customers would come in to breakfast. I remember this

*Making trouble for no reason whatsoever; in Weingarten’s interpretation, “busting chops.”

† An entropy-defying Eastern European cornmeal mush that always burns the tongue, no matter how long it sits on the table to cool.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

one lady, she said to me, ‘Do you have oatmeal?’ I said yes, I had oatmeal. She said, ‘I’ll have Wheatena.’ Then she started on the eggs, what kind you got? I told her, ‘I got all kinds, soft-boiled, scrambled, hard-boiled, omelettes.’ She said, ‘Give me shirred.’ It went on and on. There was another guy at one of my tables, one morning I had to give him a message. He read it, said, ‘Joe, my brother died, can I have a cup of coffee?’ I bring him a cup of coffee, there’s always a piece of coffee cake that comes with the coffee, it’s on the dish. He looks at it and says, ‘Is this the only kind of cake you got?’ How can he eat after that? Your brother died, you take your car, go home, why are you worried about the cake?

“One customer, a lawyer, he had an appetizer, a salad, a bowl of matzo-ball soup, then he asked me what he should have next.

I suggested roast capon with vegetables. He finished that, and the stuffed veal, and the pot roast with Yankee beans. After the pot roast, he wants pepper steak. I’m thinking, Is he an animal?

I’ve got fifty other people I have to wait on. I say to him, ‘Can I have a break now?’ He went to the maître d’, said he was insulted.” Still, Weingarten loved life in the Catskills—the women, the horses, the air.