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

by Unknown

  ’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.

  1 9 8

  A L A N R I C H M A N

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  He suffered, and not silently, for the horses that ran slow, and for the artistic works he created that remained unpublished or unsung.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

  1 9 9

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

  .

  .

  .

  *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.

  2 0 0

  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

  2 0 1

  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.

  2 0 2

  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. 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

  2 0 3

  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.

  2 0 4

  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

  2 0 5

  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 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.’ ”