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.You’re feeding people, providing for one of their basic needs, and that is—all else aside—a noble thing.And I have long held to the conviction that at every station, behind every burner, in all the professional kitchens in the world, is a guy who wants to walk out the door at the end of the night, into whatever personal hell or weirdness is waiting for him, knowing that, if nothing else, he did one thing real well.But tonight, we have done wrong and are duly ashamed.Still, that’s how you set up eighty pounds of fish fast—freezer to line in just a little over twenty minutes.It’s a nice trick.Jesus is satisfied.The Pope is satisfied.Management will be satisfied.All our masters are pleased.Everyone is still pulling sheets and bains off their stations, yelling for the dishwashers, when I holler out to Lucy, “Luz! Galley up! Bring it on.”The printer starts chattering immediately.RUSS & DAUGHTERSBy Rachel Wharton From Edible ManhattanDeputy editor of Edible Manhattan and Edible Brooklyn—just two of a growing chain of regional Edible food magazines—Rachel Wharton recently won a James Beard award for her Back of the House columns.This profile brings fresh color to a Lower East Side institution.There are many signs on the clean white walls of Russ & Daughters—the Lower East Side landmark that’s been serving smoked sable, pickled herring and slices of salmon so thin you can read the paper through them, since 1914—but the one that tells you all you need to know isn’t the jokey Lox et Veritas (a pun on Yale’s motto of light and truth); or the old-fashioned hand-painted signs that promote “Genuine Sturgeon, Imported Nuts and Caviar”; or even the one reading De gustibus non est disputandum , which is Latin for “of taste there is no dispute” and Russ-ese for “we don’t decide which fish is best, you do.”Instead, the sign that sums the salmon-slicers’ superiority is the one that boasts a quote from Anthony Bourdain, a man known more for his barbs than his bubbly blurbs.“Russ & Daughters,” it reads, “occupies that rare and tiny place on the mountaintop reserved for those who are not just the oldest and the last—but also the best.”Bourdain is no dummy.Russ & Daughters isn’t the only 100-year-old, fourth-generation family-owned business in town, not by a long shot, but it’s one of the very few places in that category where the word on the street, instead of “Meh, it was better way back when,” whenever when might have been, is still that the hour-long, out-the-door weekend line is worth the wait and that yes, you really do have to eat here before you die.This is that rarity in the New York food world: The purveyor beloved by everyone from street thugs and city politicians to chefs like locavore Peter Hoffman and lion Marco Pierre White.(“It was the finest quality fish!” White enthused by recent letter.) Russ & Daughters has been profiled by PBS, canonized by Martha, lauded at length by Calvin Trillin in nearly everything he writes and even immortalized in a 2008 J.Crew catalog, all for good reason.Because the hand-whipped, eat-it-by-the-spoonful scallion-cream cheese, the chocolate-covered jelly rings, the egg creams spritzed with real bottles of Brooklyn seltzer, that salmon—each bite an alchemy of smoke and fat—the tins of caviar and trays of whitefish salad and luscious chopped liver and latkes (those last few made from scratch in the back) at Russ & Daughters are just as good as when Joel Russ first handed over the title of the shop to Ida, Hattie and Anne in 1933.Adding them into the now neon-lit name, by the way, way before women’s lib.Heck, now that there’s more herring (with cream, with onions, with curry sauce), and even more salmon (thick-cut Scottish loins, gravlax, pastrami-style, organic double-smoked Danish), and even sandwiches like the now-famous Super Heebster (whitefish and baked salmon salad, horseradish cream cheese, wasabi-roe), you could argue Russ & Daughters keeps getting better.Especially for those who shopped for 40 years before the place started toasting the bagels.(“Yes, we toast!” says the sign.)Actually, those bagels—chewy and legit, they’re made by a local baker—weren’t around at the start either.Neither were the flatter, carb-conscious “flagels” or the mini-bagels, which oldtimers argue are actually the size a bagel should be.What was there was herring.Like so many Jews in New York City, Joel Russ emigrated from Eastern Europe, arriving in 1907 to help his sister “with her little herring business.” They sold the Jewish staple from one of many pushcarts on the streets of the Lower East Side until Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia decided to “clean up” the city streets, pushing those carts into new indoor markets like the nearby Essex.Luckily Russ had saved his pennies, and in 1914 he opened the tiny J.R.Russ National Appetizing at 187 Orchard Street, expanding his stock to include other smoked and cured fish, plus accoutrements like cream cheese, and then moving, by 1920, to the current home at 179 East Houston Street.Those foods are what the second line on the neon sign means by “appetizers.” To Jews of a certain age in New York City—and their offspring, no doubt—appetizing is a noun, not an adjective.Traditionally New York’s Jewish delis sold meat, while “appetizing shops” sold smoked sturgeon, hand-packed tins of caviar, cured salmon, pickles, whitefish salad, cream cheeses, chocolates and “all the stuff,” says Mark Russ Federman—the third-generation owner who recently handed over the business to his daughter Niki and her cousin Josh Russ Tupper—“that goes with bagels.”Russ & Daughters is now just one of a handful of appetizing shops in the city—there’s a counter at Zabar’s and a few out in Brooklyn’s Jewish enclaves—but back in the day, they were in nearly every Jewish neighborhood, with scores on the Lower East Side alone, says Mark, who inherited the business from his mother Anne after working as a lawyer.But even with stiff competition, Russ & Daughters always held their own; Jews and gentiles from across the city made the trip for the city’s best smoked fish.(And from the city’s most beautiful servers: Joel Russ, never subtle, proudly called his daughters the Queens of Lake Sturgeon, putting the moniker on both the shopping bags and the letterhead.)In the 1940s the shop expanded to include the space next door and added dried fruits, chocolates, nuts and sweets.Photos of a party archived in the office upstairs—a far cry from that early push-cart, the family now owns the building—show jazz trumpeters and guests in finery and feathered hats where today you order chocolate-caramel-covered matzo, some of the world’s best dried fruit and hand-cut hunks of halvah.Of course other things have changed since then, too: The customer base is now only 50 percent Jewish, there’s an espresso machine, electronic scales, online ordering, a blog cleverly called Lox Populi, and the major shift, instituted back in the 1970s but regarded by regulars as a recent revolution, of making customers take a number before being served.And if you think the place can be chaotic now, the old way was not for passive newbies: Customers would jockey for a space in front of their favorite slicers, who would yell out “I see you! Who’s next?” Then the customer next in line would yell, “my next!” The ins and outs of calling the queue weren’t the only ropes to know: Eastern European custom calls for haggling, for jabs and barbs, explains Mark.“It’s a whole other way of interacting,” says Niki, of the old-school ways the old-timers conduct business.“I like the way the customers feel like they have ownership.”Because they do: A vast majority are multigenerational too [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]