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

the only people who ever eat slowly are young men and women meeting for the first time. Marriages are arranged in this Orthodox community, and the first meeting must take place decorously in a public place, not in a movie theater or in a car. If there is no magic, the young man and woman eat and are out in ten minutes. If they like each other, they might sit talking until the restaurant closes.

“They go home, tell the person who arranged it that they want to see each other,” Margulies says. “They’re engaged in a week, married in three months, and have the first baby nine months and a week later.”

Still, no waiters were quite like those at Ratner’s. They had more to offer. Like footwear. Charlie, one of the most famous, kept boxes of shoes in his basement locker and sold them tableside while taking orders. Nobody could try them on, and nobody could get a refund.

Whenever a customer came back to complain that the shoes he bought were too tight, Charlie would say, “Put them in water to stretch.” Susan Friedland, a cookbook editor, says that in 1970 she took a 2 0 6

A L A N R I C H M A N

soft-spoken, non-Jewish friend to Ratner’s, and he asked the waiter to substitute mashed potatoes for the boiled potatoes that came with the dish. The waiter said it came with boiled potatoes, her friend kept insisting on mashed potatoes, they kept going back and forth and finally the waiter said, “I’ll get you mashed.” The dish came out, and it had four boiled potatoes on it. My friend said, “Don’t you remember? I asked for mashed.” The waiter picked up a fork, smashed down on the potatoes, and said, “There, you have mashed.” Seymour Paley, the owner of Corky’s, says the reason he always preferred to hire Jewish waitresses for his place was his experience with Jewish waiters. “I couldn’t stand them,” he says. “I once walked into Ratner’s with my twelve-year-old nephew, ordered lox and eggs, no onions. The kid couldn’t eat onions. The waiter brought it out, it had onions. I said to him, ‘Didn’t I say, sir, no onions for the kid?’ The waiter said to me, ‘C’mon, be a sport.’ ”

The oldest Jewish waiter at Ratner’s turns out to be Alex Hersko, seventy, the very fellow I offended on my earlier visit. His partner, the Ethiopian woman who tried to introduce us, explains his rejection of my friendly overture: “That’s the way he is. When you’re that way for thirty years, you never change.” He either fails to recognize me or is polite enough to pretend that he does not. He tells me he was born in Romania, came to New York in 1970 by way of Israel, and shortly after his arrival here was fortunate enough to be offered a job at Ratner’s. When he started, only one of the waiters wasn’t Jewish. “I can tell you, a Jewish waiter in a Jewish place, a Jewish customer comes in, he feels very comfortable, he feels it is like home. A Jew goes into a restaurant and the waiter is Gentile, he doesn’t feel the same. Start talking Yiddish and you’re friends immediately.” Hersko’s hairline is receding, which is not news where elderly Jewish waiters are concerned, but his six-inch graying ponytail makes him one of a kind. He explains, “My wife started cutting my hair after I went to an Italian barber twenty years ago and F O R K I T O V E R

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he cut it like a German soldier’s. She cut it for fifteen years, then one day, a few years ago, she says she doesn’t want to cut my hair anymore, I should find a barber. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll let it grow.’

Now my steady customers, they ask for Alex with the ponytail.” And so the epoch of the Jewish waiter ends. Hersko was everything I had hoped to find—a little too cranky and a little too caring, all at the same time. He even writes songs, not that they’ve done so well. For me, he represented thousands of waiters, tens of thousands of orders of fried cheese kreplach,* millions of trips to the kitchen and back. I asked what it meant to him to be the standard-bearer of a century of tradition, to be the oldest and quite possibly the last elderly Jewish waiter working on the Lower East Side.

“It doesn’t impress me,” he replied.

GQ, october 2000

*Ravioli-like dumplings that at Ratner’s, I have to say, tasted even more Amish than the blintzes.

P E T E J O N E S I S A

M A N A M O N G P I G S

Oddly enough, restaurants in most sections of the country feel obligated to offer a variety of sandwiches. That’s because not everybody has learned how to make any one kind of sandwich so perfectly that no others are required.

Here in New York City, for example, we have more kinds of sandwiches than we have people carrying lunch pails. I was lamenting this situation not long ago while nibbling a caviar-and-smoked-salmon croque-monsieur at Le Bernardin. As I absentmindedly munched on the egg-battered sandwich, I found myself thinking not of the citified seafood combination in my hand but of an incomparable sandwich experience in my past. I vividly recalled the rhythmic crack of cleaver on cutting board, the glorious vision of wood smoke belching darkly into the sky, the heady scent of vinegar infused with Texas Pete Hot Sauce.

I realized that my memories of the sandwiches made with hand-chopped pork that I’d eaten in eastern North Carolina had become clearer to me than reality. Almost fifteen years had passed since I’d last walked into a barbecue spot down there and said, “A sandwich, please.” No further expression of my needs was necessary,