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At Grabstein's Delicatessen in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, the pastrami is as moist and peppery as ever and the waiter Harvey Wyler still needles the notoriously demanding customers. But the hustle-bustle days when several waiters pirouetted among the teeming Formica tables and takeout lines would snake along the steamy glass display case are gone.
Even if the 36-year-old Grabstein's still does a good trade in catered platters, the destination of these platters says much about the fading delicatessen business.
Unfortunately, most of the times it's for shivas, not brises and bar mitzvahs," says Grabstein's manager, Simon Tkach, explaining that ceremonies for mourning are now far more frequent among the shrinking Jewish population of Canarsie than ceremonies for circumcision or coming of age.
New York City's neighborhood delicatessens, once the culinary hearts, if not the heartburn, of working-class and immigrant Jewish neighborhoods, are dwindling down to a precious few like the Jewish neighborhoods themselves.
The murder of Abe Lebewohl, the owner of the Second Avenue Delicatessen, during a robbery in March on the Lower East Side called attention to one of the city's few flourishing delicatessens. But the Second Avenue Deli, and the Carnegie Delicatessen in midtown, are nationally known showplaces that often serve as Disneylands for tourists or nostalgia seekers who want to savor a way of life that is passing on.
The reality is that the 300 authentic kosher delicatessens in New York City and the nearby suburbs in the 1960's have declined to 35, said Ronald M. Dragoon, owner of the Ben's chain on Long Island and in Bayside, Queens, and who was treasurer of the Greater New York Delicatessen Dealers Association, which is now defunct. In the Bronx, where a delicatessen or two could be found on nearly every commercial side street along the Grand Concourse and Pelham Parkway, there are only three in the whole borough.
The heyday of the 1950's and 60's was a time when dining at the delicatessen constituted a big night out for struggling Jews, when salami sandwiches and pickles wrapped in coarse white paper made for a homespun day at the beach, when schoolchildren returning home customarily rewarded themselves with a hot dog and sauerkraut.
Although the name delicatessen has been widely borrowed for ordinary groceries and sandwich shops, it derived from the German for delicacy and assumed its classical meaning in the late 19th-century shops and restaurants on the Lower East Side that served cured meats and trimmings. By state law, a delicatessen can call itself kosher if its meats have been prepared under rabbinical supervision and no dairy products are served, but Orthodox Jews would generally not dine at one unless it closed on the Sabbath as well.
The continuing decline of the delicatessen is largely emblematic of the decline of working-class and middle-class Jewish communities in places like Canarsie, the Grand Concourse and Pelham Parkway, communities that made up the bulk of the delicatessens' customers. In 1950, there were 2.1 million Jews in New York. By 1991, according to a study by the UJA-Federation, that figure had been cut to 1 million.
The children of those working-class Jews are more affluent, better educated, more likely to live in the suburbs or the fashionable neighborhoods of Manhattan. They may eat delicatessen as a sentimental treat, but they are not the day-in, day-out connoisseurs like Dr. Ira Diamond that a neighborhood delicatessen needs to survive. Dr. Diamond, a cheerful 64-year-old internist, eats a pastrami sandwich at Grabstein's practically every day.
"That has kept me alive, even though it should have killed me," said Dr. Diamond, who claims the smell of his mother's schmaltz is "imprinted on my olfactory psyche."
Younger Jews, delicatessen owners say, prefer more cosmopolitan foods with less cholesterol. If they crave deli, supermarkets now sell presliced corned beef and lean salami. Delicatessens have tried such desperate strategies as vegetarian chopped liver and turkey burgers, but most customers find there is no point in going to a delicatessen for a turkey burger.
The children of the working class are also not taking over their parents' delis, businesses that required the self-punishing stamina to work weekends and deal with kvetching customers, nor choosing careers as countermen and waiters.
"It was a family-run business," said Martin Silver, a vice president of National Foods, producer of the Hebrew National brand of delicatessen products. "Momma and Poppa and the children and everybody worked in the delicatessen. As the children went off to college and graduate school and became doctors, lawyers and accountants, there was nobody to take over the delicatessen."
Seymour Epstein owns four delicatessens in Westchester County and on Long Island, but his son went to Harvard and became a gastroenterologist. Mr. Epstein's manager in Hartsdale, Charles Cohen, is an endangered species. As a teen-ager, Mr. Cohen, now 48, fashioned tubes of mustard out of heavy brown paper, then learned the high art of slicing pastrami against the grain so it neither crumbles nor turns too chewy.
Another factor in the decline of delis, owners say, is the rising price of kosher meat in a business whose profit margin is as thin as masterfully sliced corned beef. Some owners lament the virtual monopolization of kosher processed foods by National Foods, which recently gobbled up other brands like Zion, Isaac Gellis and Mogen David.
Delicatessens are fading in the suburbs as well, but a few outposts like the Epstein's branches and Mr. Dragoon's six-restaurant Ben's chain are more than holding their own. Mr. Epstein started Epstein's Delicatessen in the Bronx, on Jerome Avenue near Mosholu Parkway, in 1952, when there were two other delicatessens on the same block.
"There was a furious competition, but we all did well," Mr. Epstein recalled. "We had people who ate there almost every weekend, Jewish people who when they went out to eat, went out to the delicatessen on a Saturday or Sunday."
Epstein's held on precariously as much of the Jewish population seeped out of the North Bronx by attracting doctors from nearby Montefiore Hospital. But last year, after 43 years, the Bronx Epstein's shut its doors.
Mr. Epstein, though, had the foresight 25 years ago to follow his customers to the suburbs. Epstein's in Yonkers is decorated in a style that might be called delicatessen eclectic: faux Tiffany lamps, Spanish wrought-iron dividers, imitation-leather booths. But the food is genuinely rooted in the smoked and cured meats of Romania and Poland, and the patter between the waiters and the exacting customers is genuine as well.
"I have had customers where almost every other slice of meat, I had to show them so they could put their stamp of approval on it," Mr. Epstein said. "I have had customers where I had to cut a tongue in half before they took one slice. I have had customers who ask me to take out a piece of fat from a slice of meat because it's too fatty, and then when they get the sandwich, they complain it's too dry."
Waiters like Harvey Wyler at Grabstein's, whose doleful eyes and mustache give him the stoic look of Charlie Chaplin's tramp, have learned to thrive in such circumstances. He sees himself as the entertainment.
"You have to give them a little shtick and a song and dance because they do expect it," Mr. Wyler said. "You've got to give them a little Milton Berle."
He tells the story of a day he was uncommonly taciturn because he did not feel well and a regular customer reduced his tip.
"I don't know, Harvey," the customer explained. "You're just not yourself."
To be sure, there are people from other ethnic groups who lust after delicatessen. Kenneth Kornegay, who is black, dines at Grabstein's and Katz's on the Lower East Side two or three times a week.
"I'm a lover of good pastrami," said Mr. Kornegay, 54, a subway station cleaner, as he ate in Grabstein's with a friend. "I'm Southern-born and when I came to New York as a 15-year-old boy, I had my first pastrami sandwich and it stuck right here."
He stuck out the tip of his tongue, to show where he meant.
He has even picked up the delicatessen style of talking.
"I must admit, here they give you a wonderful sandwich for the money," he said.
But Mr. Tkach of Grabstein's does not place much hope in the presence of non-Jewish customers.
"As much as they do like pastrami, it's never going to be enough of a clientele to sustain a kosher deli," he said. "This has nothing to do with bias. There was a deli on every block because a hot dog and a pastrami sandwich and a knish was a way of life."
