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

Jews spend so little time outdoors they tend to be exhilarated by oxygen, much like Gentiles inhaling the heady scent of a pickle barrel for the first time. “It was hard work, sometimes three weeks without a day off, and I was the number-one waiter, people asked for me,” he recalls. “ They liked me because I got a good line with people; they like my jokes. One of my customers, a Jewish undertaker, he had a nice place on Ninety-first Street. He leaves on a Sunday, hands me an envelope, shakes my hand, says, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’ I said, ‘I hope when you are seeing me, I should be able to look at you.’ ” Eager to find as many elderly Jewish waiters as possible, I started calling. I telephoned likely restaurants in Dallas, Berkeley, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Boston, and Washington, D.C. I tried Connecticut, thinking some old F O R K I T O V E R

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Jewish waiters might have inexplicably migrated north to the Nutmeg State. I called all over New Jersey. I was certain I’d find a few in south Florida, but I did not. Not one in Miami or Miami Beach. If there is not a single elderly Jewish waiter at Wolfie’s in Miami Beach or at the Rascal House in North Miami Beach, is this not the apocalypse?

I called places with names like Saul’s, Hymie’s, Murray’s, Zaidy’s, Rubin’s, and Larry’s. Except for New York City, I got bubkes.* I started telephoning Quebec and didn’t find a single one at the famous Montreal Jewish restaurants Moishe’s and Schwartz’s.

After calling more than thirty restaurants and speaking to dozens of owners and managers, I was certain only a few elderly Jewish waiters remained, all of them in Manhattan. Yet one authority disagreed with me. Jackie Mason, whose convictions about the state of Jewish waiters cannot be ignored,† insisted I would come across “eighty to a hundred twenty” of them if I looked in Brooklyn. He pointed to the resurgence of kosher restaurants and Jewish community life there.

I didn’t think he was right, but I went anyway. I drove through Flat-bush, Borough Park, and Williamsburg, the Jewish heartlands, and a few lesser-known Jewish areas in between. I poked my head into more than a dozen kosher and kosher-style restaurants, and almost everywhere the owners shook their heads, smiled and said they had no waiters like that anymore. Finally, I found Essex on Coney.

Technically speaking, none of the waiters there qualified, since they didn’t meet my minimum requirement of sixty years of age. Still, they were too perfect to pass up. Luis Margulies, fifty-one, the youngest of the old-style professional Jewish waiters I came upon, immediately placed a dish of cholent‡ in front of me, just so I’d have a taste. Another waiter,

*Once defined as “insultingly trivial,” now accepted as “absolutely nothing.”

† When I asked Mason, who is revered by Jewish waiters, if he tipped them more than he tipped non-Jewish waiters, he replied, “I’m not going to tip a Jew more than a non-Jew. That sick I’m not.”

‡ A phenomenally dense, infrequently encountered, slow-cooked Sabbath stew traditionally prepared before sundown on Fridays and left in the oven overnight, where it thickens even more.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

Norman Wasserberg, one month shy of his sixtieth birthday, told me he knew of no more than six or seven waiters like him still working in Brooklyn.

Margulies and Wasserberg were wearing semidressy outfits—open-collar white shirts, black vests, black pants, black shoes—splattered with food stains. They apologized for their appearance, explaining that neatness was impossible with the clientele they had. Nobody who ate there wanted to sit for more than twenty minutes, and waiters had to dodge customers and one another as they scurried between kitchen and dining room.

This was all new to me. I understood that Jewish families of Eastern European descent weren’t obsessed with table manners—Jews were always too busy learning ethics to bother with manners. Nevertheless, I’d always believed that Jews ate slowly, since holiday meals, such as the Passover seder, are long and contemplative. At Essex on Coney, I watched Jews eat as though the Cossacks* had just come through the gates.

“See those two?” says Wasserberg, nodding covertly toward two well-dressed, middle-aged Jewish women sitting at a table behind us. “They’re waiting for another woman, but they won’t wait.

They’ll order.”

Three minutes later, they have their food and are eating.

Their friend shows up, gets a menu, orders, appears not at all upset that her friends have started without her. She just eats faster, and the three finish together, as though the meal were choreographed.

“Throw it at the people, they eat it,” Wasserberg says. “Soup, main dish, they want it all at once. The other day, I had a special event, twenty-seven people. I served twenty-seven stuffed cabbages, twenty-seven soups, they chose from three appetizers, they had a choice of five main dishes, they had dessert, and

*They should rot in hell, and their horses, too.

F O R K I T O V E R

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they were out in an hour and a half. And that was with two speeches.”

He and Margulies start telling stories, trying to top each other.

“I have people walk in,” says Margulies, “and while they’re walking to the table, they give you the order. Soup, appetizer, main dish, they want it all at once.”

“I give them the check sometimes before I serve the food,” Wasserman says.

Margulies tells me about the time he was taking an order at one table and a customer at the next table started pulling on his pants leg, too impatient to wait his turn.

Wasserman says that with some families, if the man finishes first, he gets up and leaves the restaurant.

They both recall a wedding where the guests started grabbing food from trays being brought from the kitchen.

They tell me