Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

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  When I get there, I’m stopped. The person doing the stopping is a small girl, maybe five years old. She’s adorable, and she’s selling The Final Call. I tell her I’ve already got it.

  The second person guarding the door is her mother. She says to the girl, “Tell him thank you, honey.” The girl says, “Thank you.” The Nation of Islam isn’t so tough after all.

  I walk through the door, into an anteroom where about a half-dozen security men stand watch. The guy in the lemon-yellow suit is being frisked. Much to my surprise, I’m not escorted out. I’m told to empty my pockets, lean against the wall, spread ’em. What is this—a house of worship or an episode of Cops?

  I hold out my keys, my wallet, a couple of pens, and a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook.

  Whoops.

  I await cries of “Get the scribe!” Nobody says a thing. I’m patted down, asked to register. A kindly gentleman at the sign-in desk asks me how I heard about the services. I tell him word gets around.

  I nod to the guards, walk through another door. I’m in. I don’t know why I’ve been admitted after being explicitly informed of a ban against whites. Maybe it’s because Farrakhan isn’t speaking this Sunday and they figure I’m not there just for a show. Maybe they’ve seen me at Salaam and figure I’m genuinely interested in the Nation of Islam.

  Maybe I don’t look Jewish.

  Inside, Mosque Maryam is spacious and bright, with theater-style seats. The women sit apart from the men and outnumber them two to one. Everyone is very still. No chatting. No looking around.

  The mosque is about one-fifth full. I surreptitiously glance around.

  I seem to be the only white person. I’m seated between two young men, neither of whom looks at me. Almost everybody is neatly and carefully dressed, although I notice some young men in hooded sweatshirts.

  Several of the Fruit of Islam stand facing the audience. A few minutes after two p.m., they slam themselves into their seats like plebes at a military academy dining hall. The service begins with a short prayer, and then an introductory speaker sets the stage for Ishmael Muham-1 8 8

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  mad, one of the sons of Elijah Muhammad and the assistant minister of the mosque.

  He bids all of us “As-salaam alaikum,” and the response from many of the men in the audience is a militaristic “Wa-alaikum salaam, sir!” Ishmael Muhammad speaks for about an hour and a half, emphasizing family values.

  He is in favor of more home cooking and fewer soap operas and talk shows. “Oprah and Montel won’t make you a success,” he exclaims.

  The only whites he impugns by name are Betty Crocker and Sara Lee—he wants women to cook, not just open packages. His anger at what white people do to black people is restrained. His admiration of what white people do for one another is intended to be a lesson: he wants black people to treat one another equally well.

  He is particularly concerned about the disciplining of small children. He says his mother “popped” him as a child, and the children of today would grow up better if they were popped more often. He recommends decisive action against children who squirm while having their diapers changed.

  From the meeting, I take away this message: Those who have the most to fear from the Nation of Islam are two-year-olds who are not potty-trained.

  On the way out, I receive a smile and a friendly nod. It is from the same Fruit of Islam who did not allow me to enter through the front doors.

  On the basis of my five meals at Salaam, I know this: The bakery is adequate. The casual-dining areas are clean and comfortable and, perch aside, offer tasty food. To me, the mystery lies in the effort to offer “fine dining.” I do not believe many of the followers of the Nation of Islam can afford the prices—lamb chops without vegetables cost more than twenty dollars, once the mandatory 15 percent tip is added. I cannot find any attraction for people who are not members of the Nation of Islam.

  Farrakhan has publicly stated his intention of restoring the food-service strategies of Elijah Muhammad, who opened a series of mod-F O R K I T O V E R

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  est Salaam restaurants in the sixties and seventies. (The last of them closed in the late seventies.) He has announced plans for five more Salaam complexes, costing at least $2 million each. He intends to buy up a million acres of farmland.

  None of this explains why he requires a restaurant with gold-trimmed salt-and-pepper shakers and golden fixtures in the bathrooms.

  He is a proud man and quite likely a vain one, fond of silk suits, Italian alligator shoes, and gold jewelry. Perhaps he feels only a palace can adequately reflect the national figure he has become. He is a doting father, and his daughter, Maria Farrakhan Muhammad, designed and supervised the building of Salaam. “She’s quite an artist, and she does make things quite expensive,” he said, fondly and forgivingly, at the opening ceremonies. Perhaps it is too much to ask an indulgent dad to rein in his beloved daughter.

  In my five visits to the restaurant, I saw only one other white person, a white man dining with a black woman. I can only guess at Farrakhan’s motives for building Salaam. If he did it with the admirable goal of reducing the isolation into which he has guided the Nation of Islam, his plan is likely to fail.

  GQ, september 1995

  O L D E S T L I V I N G J E W I S H

  W A I T E R S T E L L A L L

  What I said to the elderly Jewish waiter working the lunch shift at Ratner’s in New York was this and nothing more: “Your partner here is very nice, but I wish our waiter were you.” I meant no disrespect, but I had forgotten the first commandment of conversing with an elderly Jewish waiter: Watch your words, because what the customer says is rarely what the waiter hears. I was speaking in English, the language of the happy-go-lucky Pilgrims, and he was listening in Yiddish, the language of the long-oppressed Jews of Eastern Europe.* As Leo Rosten points out in his classic work The Joys of Yiddish, the language “lends itself to an extraordinary range of observational nuances and psychological subtleties.” Mostly, it lends itself to sarcasm, which is why the waiter instinctively took offense. By him, I was a momser.† I felt his eyes bore into mine for an endless three seconds as he reacted reflexively to a lifetime of aggravating customers, perceived affronts, and insufficient esteem.

  My friend Merrill Shindler, a Los Angeles food writer who grew up in the Bronx, had warned me about the wrath of the Ratner’s waiter, of provoking 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 litt
le 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 feelings if you did not—they might even stop to talk to you, and the best of them combined the folk wisdom of Sholem Aleichem† with the resigned weariness of the shtetl.‡

  The uncritical affection I felt for them is almost certainly a result of my unconditional failure as a Hebrew school student. My inability to learn the ancestral language, combined with a desultory performance at my bar mitzvah, caused me to be scorned as a dimwit in the Jewish community. I ended up uneasy with religious formality, but I loved the

  *A waiter walks out of the kitchen, carrying a steak. A second waiter says to him,

  “Moishe, what’s your thumb doing in the meat?” Moishe replies, “What, you want I should drop it again?”

  † Pen name of nineteenth-century Yiddish humorist Sholem Rabinowitz—

  which, by the way, is my mother’s maiden name, not that I’ve seen a penny in royalties.

  ‡ The isolated, backward Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, inspiration for many a sardonic joke that begins, “The rabbi of the shtetl was walking along when . . .” F O R K I T O V E R

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  waiters, who were living Judaic artifacts. That they came forth bearing food helped, because my family, like most Jewish families of Eastern European background, confused food with affection. The primary Jewish token of love isn’t a bouquet. It’s a brisket.

  “Henny Youngman was a lovely guy,” says Jack Sirota, recalling the famous funnyman and Carnegie Deli regular, “but as a tipper he was a bum. He said to me, ‘Aren’t I a good tipper?’ I said to him, ‘If this was 1935, you’d be great.’ He said, ‘Jack, I tip a dollar here and a dollar at the Friar’s Club.’ I said, ‘You’re a bum here and a bum there.’ ”

  After forty-one years waiting tables at the Carnegie, Sirota has become almost as much a symbol of the Manhattan restaurant as the eccentrically grandiose sandwiches—number thirteen, a turkey, corned beef, swiss cheese, and coleslaw combo, has been known to weigh in at three pounds. He’s six feet tall, and back in the days when he weighed 310 pounds, he was photographed holding an oversize sandwich for a promotional poster. The cap-tion read not all the skyscrapers in nyc are made of glass and marble. Woody Allen, who used to be a Carnegie regular, cast him as a waiter (no stretch there) in Broadway Danny Rose, but Sirota says, “Since he married Soon-Yi, I don’t see him.” A lot has changed at the Carnegie over the years. The sandwiches are bigger. Sirota is smaller, having taken off forty pounds.

  Most of all, the regulars don’t come around as much, now that tourists line up outside and the wait can be forty minutes on weekends. “Now it’s ninety-nine and three-quarters percent transient trade, and maybe one percent Jewish,” he says. “We put out matzohs on Passover. They take a bite and say, ‘What’s this?’ ” Sirota was born in Brooklyn and started his career as a waiter in the Catskills, the modest mountain range north of New York City where Jews went to breathe fresh air but ended up spending most of their time in the dining rooms. The Jewish waiters who worked up there remember those days with affection. They 1 9 6

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  were all young, slim, handsome, and made a very good living.

  Sirota recalls, with a rueful smile, that he weighed 150 when he worked at the Avon Lodge.

  “During summertime the hotel was quite busy, with five hundred guests,” he says, “but after the Jewish holidays * I’d go to Canada, fishing and hunting. In 1955 I bought a brand-new Oldsmobile; it cost me twenty-eight hundred dollars and included a tank of gas. I had two guns, two fishing rods, and no shortage of girls. When I say I was a ladies’ man, I didn’t take them for pizza. For steak. I made a lot of money and lived well. In those days, three drinks cost a doll
ar.

  “It was the best time of my life. One of my special guests in the hotel was Sid Caesar. He was a great guy, very nice. I even played pinochle with him. Sid Caesar was quite a marksman. I would go into town, buy cans of shaving cream, and he would shoot them to see how high they would go. He had a . 357 Magnum and a high-powered rifle. He wouldn’t kill a fly, but he loved to shoot. His best friend owned the Joyva halvah† company. They’d fill the halvah tins with seltzer, shoot at them. If you have money, you can do anything.”

  Finally, Sirota met the woman he wanted to marry, the cousin of his brother’s wife. She didn’t want to live in the mountains, so they returned to New York City, and he went to work at Mirko’s Guitar Room, where he once waited on Carl Sandburg. “You can’t get any bigger than that,” he says.

  His life is quiet now. He works only three days a week, this sweet, shambling man who seems at peace with the world. While I’m talking to him, a Chinese-American waitress who has been

  *Jews divide the year according to the standard Gregorian calendar when speaking to Gentiles, but “before the holidays” and “after the holidays” when addressing other Jews.

  † A delicious sesame-seed candy that rightfully belongs to the Arabs, unlike Jerusalem.

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  at the Carnegie for fourteen years interrupts several times, angrily and forcefully, to point out how difficult Sirota was when she first arrived. Speaking of all the old Jewish waiters at the Carnegie, not just Sirota, she says, “They were so mean, they killed me.” He lets her speak, and then he says, softly, that times were different then. He had supervisory responsibilities, and it was 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