April 11, 2013 | 3:08 pm

Passover at Malachy’s Bar

Posted by Rob Eshman

Follow me on

For years now I have had a pre-Passover ritual: I drink one last beer before the holiday starts. 

According to Jewish law, you're forbidden from eating or drinking foods made with wheat, barley, rye, spelt or oats.  Those of you into $10,000 Pyramid would by now have guessed the answer why:  these are "Things That Could Be Leavened."  And leavened bread is a no-no.

All year I have a, hmm, complex relationship with kosher, outside our home.  But for the eight days of Passover,  I do avoid these foods.  Even though this means avoiding one of my favorite foods, beer.

Usually I just put a bottle aside as we’re cleaning the house in preparation for the holiday, and I make it the last grainy thing to toss out—and I toss it right down my throat.

But this year we celebrated Passover in New York City, and in the apartment where we stayed the only beer was a can of Bud Light, which doesn’t have enough beer flavor to last me through the eight day holiday.  Actually, it hasn’t any flavor at all.

I asked Naomi to join me on my quest for a local bar and a last beer and she was game.   Usually on the first night of Passover we are home, and I am so busy cooking I won’t see her until the seder starts.  Now we had a moment to enter the holiday peacefully, together.

It was cold and overcast and miserable—that is, spring in New York. We  soon decided the best bar was the closest one.   At 72nd and Columbus,  I pulled open the  door on the first storefront with with a beer sign in the window – the sign above the door said Malachy’s.  

An Irish bar at 4 pm on a Monday in New York City— now that’s some good people watching.

We sat at a small table. I ordered a Guinness, and Naomi nursed a coffee with milk she’d bought from a bakery across the street. Then we began a round of “What’s up with them?”

At the side of the bar closest to the front door sat a single woman, pretty, blonde, in her Anne Klein best, drinking alone.  Two musicians walked in, lugging a standup bass in a case.  At another table an older, bald man held a series of meetings with a steady stream of rough-hewn deliverymen who came in and out—we figured he was either the owner, or a bookie.

At the other end of the bar stood the bartender. He was a very solid Irishman with the face of former boxer and shiny head, and the older man and woman he talked and joked with seemed to all be on their second or third round.

An ancient black cook emerged from the kitchen with a plate of fried food. His white apron was tied around his rib cage, over a T shirt that said, “I’m the Cook.”

At the four-top beside us sat an odd family assortment—a little girl, an old man, maybe 80, eating fish and chips, and a woman, middle age, likely the mom.  After a while these people got up to leave.   The older man paid, and I heard him tell the bartender he was about to celebrate his 74th wedding anniversary.

Seventy-four?  I had to say something.

"How is that even possible," I asked.

His granddaughter—the woman about our age— explained.  They were Jewish. Her grandfather had been coming to Malachy's every year just before the start of Passover  to have one last whiskey—a Seagrams VO, on the rocks.  He was 99 years old.  He'd been coming to Malachy's on the even of Passover, every Passover, for 30 years.

The man and his wife live in Baltimore, but they spend the seder nearby with their daughter and her family.

“One day he went out for a walk to get away from the craziness,” his granddaughter told me, “and he stopped at this bar for a drink, and he’s been coming back ever since.  When I was my daughter’s age, he would take me."  she pointed to the little girl. " And now he takes his great-granddaughter.”

“He just has a glass of whiskey each year before Passover?” I asked.

Oh, no, the daughter corrected me.   “He drinks two  every night.  He's been doing that as long as I remember.”

The man was tall, straight-backed, and from overhearing their conversation, I could tell he was as sharp as anybody in the place.

I raised my glass to the man and said “L’chaim,” and we wished him a Happy Passover, there in Malachy’s Pub.

The man and his family walked out.   

I turned to the bartender and said, "I'll have what he's having."

And I toasted Passover-- and a 99 year old man named Albert-- with my very first sip of Seagrams V.O.

April 10, 2013 | 11:14 am

The Foragers [SLIDESHOW]

Posted by Rob Eshman

“And God said, behold, I give you every herb-bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed, to you it shall be for meat. … I have given every green plant for food” (Genesis 1:29-30).

When I hike in the Santa Monica Mountains, I have a habit of snacking. The thing is, I don’t bring along any food. I follow my bible, a stained and dog-earned book on the native foods of the Gabrielino Indians. 

The Gabrielinos and the Tongva lived here for thousands of years before the Spaniards arrived (and then, in a relative flash, just about wiped the Indians out). They ate the stuff we ignore — the plants sprouting just about now all over our hillsides, the weeds growing by the freeways, the animals flitting across our driveways.

People who share my admittedly strange obsession about these native foods usually fall into one of two categories. There are outdoor enthusiasts, like the late Euell Gibbons — “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” And there are the survivalists, who plan on hiding in caves with a deer carcass so the Trilateral Commission’s black helicopters can’t see them. 

And then there are people like me, who feel that if food connects us to something sacred, native food — unadulterated, undeveloped — connects us to the purest taste of that. It’s weird, I know — especially when my wife catches me nibbling a stalk of wild fennel while we’re walking the dog. But there it is — I admit it. 

And last week, I found I wasn’t alone.

An invitation came for a dinner sponsored by the edgy women of This Is Not a Pop-Up. It featured food picked entirely from local areas, foraged by Mia Wasilevich and Pascal Baudar, and prepared by Wasilevich.

The couple forages wild ingredients for the top restaurants in Los Angeles, like Alma, Ludo and Melisse. They lead educational tours into the local mountains and they have a blog on local foraging, called Transitional Gastronomy. 

I pulled up a chair at a cafe in Hollywood, and Baudar came by and poured a hot, bright green soup over a tangle of pea shoots, fresh peas and a clump of homemade ricotta. 

“Wild sorrel bisque,” he announced in his French-accented English. “With peas, sour grass and chive blossom.”

“Sour grass?” I asked. “What does that look like?”

Baudar brought me a silver canister, brimming with the clean sprays of plants you’ve seen a thousand times in Griffith Park or Temescal. He pinched off a bit of sour grass.

“That’s in my book!” I practically shouted.

He nodded — Baudar was the only other person I’ve met who knew exactly what book I was talking about.

“Then you know the crazy stuff I do,” he said.

The rest of the evening was just as wondrous. Baudar brought course after course from the prix fixe menu, and then showed me and other guests exactly what local plants went into each dish.

The Spring Greens featured capers he pickled himself from local flower buds. I asked Baudar to ID each of the greens, and he leaned a few inches from my plate and picked each delicate leaf: chickweed, amaranth, watercress, miner’s lettuce (“From the side of the hill away from the sun”).

Local black cod came with black garlic butter and spicy wild mustard. It’s the stuff that turns the hillsides along the 101 in Agoura into Monet paintings, and it tastes like freshly grated horseradish. The local oxtail disintegrated into a broth of wild carob, coffee, cleaver (a Gabrielino staple) and milk thistle pickles.

Talk about terroir. Locally grown tomatoes, artichokes, even oranges — they have taken to our region like welcome immigrants. But the foraged ingredients are the land. Baudar poured me a glass of homemade beer — its scent was like I’d rolled down the car window driving through Topanga Canyon. 

“I make it with mugwort and white sage and lime,” he smiled. “That’s all.”

The Belgian-born Baudar is tall, thin, with close-cropped gray hair and a scientist’s reserve. Wasilevich is more the earth mother — tanned, dark-haired and a whirl of energy. They wake up at dawn to head out into their preferred spots near Angeles National Forest. It takes three to four hours to come up with the handfuls of greens, oyster mushrooms and other earthly delights necessary to make a meal. It’s impractical to do on a large scale, though Noma in Denmark, named the world’s best restaurant by Restaurant magazine, features a mostly foraged menu.

That made the night even more of a fleeting treat. It is one thing to taste a locally grown tomato — a good, distant cousin to a non-native plant. 

But to bite into a piece of fried mallow, a plant that grows in wild, unmolested abundance everywhere I turn, not only tastes of Los Angeles but speaks to a deeper truth. The Bible says it, but we don’t act like we believe it: This earth, if we take care of it, is for us a bounty. Our land is highly edible. God provides.

See photos of this meal and follow more of Rob Eshman’s food writing on Twitter @foodaism. 

0 Comments — Leave your comment

March 22, 2013 | 1:27 pm

Oh, Jerusalem, the Cookbook [RECIPE]

Posted by Rob Eshman

In this week's Jewish Journal, Joan Nathan reviewed Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's beautiful cookbook, Jerusalem.  When I first got hold of the book last year, I knew the dream reviewer would be Joan.  She lived in Jerusalem decades ago, serving as an assistant to then mayor, and now legend, Teddy Kollek.  And it was in Jerusalem that she first discovered the variety of dishes and stories that make up Jewish cuisine.

Joan's review focuses in on exactly what makes Jerusalem-the-book as fascinating as Jerusalem-the -city. Ottolenghi is Jewish. His partner, Tamimi, is Palestinian.  Here's what Joan has to say:

I was very taken with the whole book, but their text in particular, and especially a section called “A Comment About Ownership.”

“In the part of the world we are dealing with everybody wants to own everything,” they write. “Existence feels so uncertain and so fragile that people fight fiercely and with great passion to hold onto things: land, culture, religious symbols, food — everything is in danger of being snatched away or of disappearing.” The two were describing ownership of recipes, but they might as well have been talking about ownership of the city.

My husband calls this part of the world the “Muddle East,” where discussions of who owns hummus and falafel lead to discussions of who owns streets, neighborhoods, borders. Many, like Ottolenghi and Tamimi, are tired of these discussions; they have gone into the food business in London to get away from fighting.

They, like many Israeli chefs, do not want to even think about these differences, about the conflict. Another Israeli cook in New York said to me just last week that he was a “baker, not a battler.” Ottolenghi and Tamimi use their dishes as a way to bridge these divides. “Food is a basic, hedonistic pleasure, a sensual instinct we all share and revel in. It is a shame to spoil it,” they write.

Speaking of sensual pleasure, put this recipe from Jerusalem on your Passover list, and read the entire story here.

 

PANFRIED SEA BASS WITH HARISSA AND ROSE

3 tablespoons harissa paste

1 teaspoon ground cumin

Salt

4 sea bass fillets, or other white fish, about 1 pound in total, skinned and with pin bones removed

Matzah cake meal or flour for dusting

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 medium onions, finely chopped

6 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Scant 1 cup water

1 1/2 tablespoons honey

1 tablespoon rose water (optional for Passover)

Scant 1/2 cup currants (optional)

2 tablespoons cilantro, coarsely chopped (optional)

2 teaspoons small dried edible rose petals, available at Middle Eastern grocery stores and online

Mix together half the harissa, cumin and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a small bowl.  Rub the paste all over the fish fillets and leave them to marinate for 2 hours in the fridge.

Dust the fillets with a little matzah cake meal or flour and shake off the excess. Heat the olive oil in a wide frying pan over medium-high heat and fry the fillets for 2 minutes on each side. You may need to do this in two batches.

Set the fish aside, leave the oil in the pan and add the onions. Stir as you cook for about 8 minutes, until the onions are golden. Add the remaining harissa, vinegar, cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon salt and plenty of black pepper. Pour in the water, lower the heat and let the sauce simmer gently for 10 to 15 minutes, until quite thick. Add the honey and rose water to the pan along with the currants and simmer gently for a couple more minutes. Taste and adjust the seasonings and then return the fish fillets to the pan; you can slightly overlap them if they don’t quite fit.

Spoon the sauce over the fish and leave them to warm up in the simmering sauce for 3 minutes; you may need to add a few tablespoons of water if the sauce is very thick. Serve warm or at room temperature, sprinkled with cilantro and rose petals.

Makes 2 to 4 servings.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

March 5, 2013 | 1:13 pm

My Tuscan Grill

Posted by Rob Eshman

In the winter, I cook in my fireplace.

I’ve been doing this for the past three years, and like any ongoing relationship, I’m getting a little better at it and a little more involved each year. My wife and kids, they think it’s a phase.

But this winter, on a visit to the Ferry Building in San Francisco, I emerged from a garden store carrying a heavy cardboard box.

“What’s that?” my wife said.

“A Tuscan grill!” I said.

Even though people—including my own family—are shocked and surprised and bemused by my obsession, it’s hardly a new idea. A fireplace is just an indoor fire, and people have been cooking on fire for quite some time. Before the advent of the stainless steel range, most cuisine was fireplace cuisine.

Slow-food crusader Alice Waters has been pushing the Tuscan grill, and cooking in the fireplace, for years.

"There is a universal magic in fire that transforms food as it grills," she writes in her book "The Art of Simple Food."

"Grilling is nothing like cooking on a stove top or in a gas or electric oven: There's an unpredictability to it, a wild side, an immediacy that sets it apart."

 For the past few years, I’ve been doing a much more rudimentary version of fireplace cooking: balancing a cast iron pan or griddle against some log, hoping the whole thing won't tip over and conflagrate.  I wrote about here.

I first saw a Tuscan grill in... Tuscany.  We were walking in the town of Greve and I spotted one in a hardware store.  On the plane home I regretted not buying it, and until I found the same model on the Internet, I thought my only recourse was to improvise.  Then I found one at the Ferry Building.

The Tuscan Grill , from a company called Bella Cucina, comes in a cardboard box printed with the words “BELLA CUCINA.” It is from Tuscany, actually from the town of Chianti. It is a two-step assembly. You turn the frame pieces into an L, then secure them with the two included screws. That takes 2 minutes. You screw the wood handles onto the pre-threaded rods. That’s a minute. I had to wedge the feet of the assembled grill under the exposed gas pipe that ignites my fireplace. It fit snugly, and the dark metal blended into my fireplace. And that was it: now I was ready to cook.

As far as I can tell, there is not a lot of literature on fireplace cuisine. The grill itself came with a single printed sheet showing a pictograph of the assembly. Maybe the Tuscans figured every human, descended as we are from millennia of ancestors who only cooked on fire, just intuitively knows how to do it. Indeed, I figured it out.

You light a fire using dry, hard wood. I use oak. You let the logs burn down to hot embers. You place the grill the right distance from the heat—there are three levels on the frame, and moving the grill with the wood handles is easy. You put your food on the grill. It cooks. The first night I made a chicken that I flattened and seasoned with nothing but salt, pepper and olive oil. I wanted to taste what the fire did to it on its own. It gives the meat a sweet, smoky flavor-- mouth-watering is the word.

The second night I cooked albacore, which I brushed with teriyaki. The third night, my son’s last before returning to college, I went Chianti style—two 2 “ grass fed kosher rib eye steaks, each 1 ½-2” thick, rubbed with garlic, olive oil salt and pepper. The fourth night, chicken thighs, marinated in date syrup, mustard, soy, garlic—a recipe I learned from my sister in law Etti in Israel.

“We are eating a lot of animals,” my daughter pointed out. We were. It wasn’t just the thrill of a new cooking toy. The fire lit something primal in me. It called out for flesh. Squatting by the embers, I could be naked back in the cave. This is as far from the sterile world of the mnodern kitchen as you can get, and still eat at home.  

 I did supplement with vegetables. One night I grilled portobellos alongside the chicken. I brushed them with olive oil, red wine, balsamic, salt, pepper and garlic. They tasted like steak. I boiled kale, chopped it, mixed it with olive oil, garlic, red pepper and ancovies and set it in a pan on the grate.  It continues to cook and gain a rich, wood-oven edge.  I did the same with chard.  Then, back to dead animals:  whole trout, wrapped in the first grape leaves to appear on my vines.

That next morning I took a break from the slaughter and made eggs. I poured some olive oil in a cast iron pan, set it on the grate. When it was sizzling, I cracked two eggs. They cooked in just over a minute. They were crisp-bottomed, slightly smoky—they might have been the best thing to come out of the flames.

Since that week-long flame-fest, I've made turkey burgers and pizza.  The burgers were moist on the inside, crisp outside. The pizza was less successful-- the tops just didn't cook in time.  Lesson learned.  

Now that the weather is warming up (in Los Angeles), I'm using the grill less.  And I miss it.  There is something about cooking by fire that returns us to the roots of cooking; that is, to the essence of what makes us human. 

How to Cook on a Tuscan Grill

1. Before purchasing the Tuscan Grill, check the set-up and dimensions of your fireplace. The supports of the grill are 2 inches high—make sure you have that much clearance.

2. Spray or brush the grill with oil before using.

3. Make a hot fire. I never had to use more than two logs. Allow time for the logs to burn to hot glowing embers. You do not want to cook over leaping flames.

4. Have all your utensils ready: long tongs, a serving platter, heat-proof oven mitts, a knife and fork for cutting meat to test it. I never had to use the mitts because the wood handles stay cool, but then again my hands can tolerate a lot of heat.  Have a flashlight handy too.

5. Let the grill heat over the logs. Add your ingredients. Pay attention to hot and less hot spots on the grill, and move the food around accordingly.

6. Fireplaces cook hot and dry and uniquely. Pay no attention to written cooking times—learn to test for doneness yourself.

7. Be careful. You’re playing with fire.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

March 5, 2013 | 11:18 am

Passover at Street

Posted by Rob Eshman

Call me old-fashioned, but if a restaurant is going to hold a Passover seder, shouldn't it at least be on Passover?

That's one thing I like about Chef Susan Feniger's seder at her restaurant Street.  It's on Tuesday, March 26 at 5 pm, the second night of Passover.

The other thing I like is the menu.  Here it is:

 

Russian Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce and Mint Oil

Green Ben Salad with Watercress and Chopped Egg Gribiche
(vegan version made with Chopped Olive Vinaigrette)

Heirloom Spinach Soup with Matzo Balls

Choice of:

Lamb Musubi
with Saffron Rice, Pepper Sauce, Grapeleaf, and Pickled Almonds
(vegan version made with Harissa Crusted Roast Tomato)

Or

Matzo Crusted Spring Nettle Cakes
with Mustard Sauce and Smoked Halibut
(vegan version made with Smoked Mushroom)


Coconut Macaroons
dipped in Moroccan Spiced Chocolate

*Full wine list and cocktails will also be available.

KID’S MENU:      
Heirloom Spinach Soup with Matzo Balls

Roasted Lamb or Baked Halibut

Green Bean Salad with Lemon and Olive Oil

Rice

Coconut Macaroons
dipped in Moroccan Spiced Chocolate

 

Granted, it's NOT kosher (can I be more clear), and it combines milk with meat, another no no, but it does nod to the strictures of Passover by using matzo, and not using any breads or grains forbidden during the holiday.  Plus, it looks really good.

Rabbi Eleanor Steinman from the congregation Kol Ami will lead the Seder, as she has for the past few years.  It's $55/pp. For more information, call 323.203.0500. 

And to go with it, here's a video on "How to Make Your Own Matzo" from the web site DIYfood.com.  I'm going to assume Feniger's seder will include her homemade matzo as well.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

February 20, 2013 | 12:22 pm

West Hollywood’s Ta-eem Grill, a spot for vegan and meat eaters

Posted by Rob Eshman

My favorite vegan food in Los Angeles these days comes from a small, crowded restaurant on Melrose with a giant skewer of animal flesh rotating in the window.

In a city that seems to be enthralled with new vegan and conscious-food temples, like Café Gratitude and Feed Body & Soul, that statement may come as a shock. These are places filled with raw kale, beautiful actors (both serving and eating) and menus that describe food in such spiritual terms, you’d think you were in shul.

Meanwhile, West Hollywood’s Ta-eem Grill, which specializes in the kind of Israeli street food you’d eat standing up at the Shuk HaCarmel, has no such pretenses.

But much of the food is naturally vegan. And if it’s a dose of spirituality you want, Ta-eem has that, too — without the self-consciousness and self-promotion. 

That comes in the form of the owner, chef and proprietor, Yoel Kraizberger.

It is the animating spirit of Kraizberger, as much as his superb food, that allows me to compare a tiny hummus and shwarma place on Melrose to two cutting-edge food-movement temples in Venice.

Putting a declaration on a menu or a Web site about soul and spirit is one thing, but at Ta-eem you come face to face with the owner who embodies all that. At the end of the day, food alone doesn’t feed us — people do. And it is their spirit that inspires, moves, touches our own.

First, Kraizberger really can cook. The shwarma is crisp-edged, dripping with fat and onion. It’s the best shwarma I’ve had in Los Angeles, no question. The hummus is creamy, fresh and smooth, a foil for spicier dishes. The falafel is green with cilantro and parsley, and the matbucha, the Moroccan salad of cooked-down tomato and pepper — sweet and hot and irresistible.

But there’s also something about this man. Feeding people is clearly a service of devotion for him. You see it in the way he treats his customers, the way he talks to his staff, the stories he tells. 

Kraizberger stands just inside the glass window, calling orders, shaving shwarma, frying falafel. He wears a large Bukharan-style kippah embroidered with the words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. He greets every soul who enters. When you leave and say, “See you later,” he will stop what he’s doing, look at you — a stranger — and say, “I miss you already.”

The second time I dropped by, I asked him to sit with me outside to talk. He lit a cigarette — we were a good 13 miles from Café Gratitude, so why not? Kraizberger is from Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv. He’d worked in restaurants from the time he was 12 — “School wasn’t for me, so I worked” — and opened his own beachside cafe, Sea Palace, at 21.

He came to Los Angeles 23 years ago, thinking he could escape the food business. He started a successful car dealership, which he ran until a series of health and financial reversals left him sick and destitute.

At that point he found the spot for Ta-eem, in a place where many restaurants before had failed. 

Kraizberger told me that the bad luck started here, too, when a passer-by gave him a black-and-white photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, which Kraizberger gave away.

“Everything went very bad,” he told me. “Like you have a curse that you don’t believe. When I started this place, the problems started.”

Two years passed. “Two years of agony.” Then the same guy came back — and he gave Kraizberger another picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. This time Kraizberger hung the portrait in his restaurant. 

Ever since, he has been a success.

“As much as it’s true what I’m telling you, this story,” Kraizberger said, “it’s something the human nature cannot understand. That means he watched over me, and Rebbe Nachman. They saved my life.”

Talk about Café Gratitude.

Kraizberger finished his cigarette and his story, and I my Turkish coffee. I mentioned to him then that much of his food happened to be vegan, which is all the rage these days.

“Vegan!” he said. “Where do you think Tobey Maguire gets his matbucha? He can eat anywhere, but when he’s in town, either he comes here or I make a delivery to Sony. Spider-Man, I swear my friend, he’s addicted to matbucha.”

1 Comments — Leave your comment

January 30, 2013 | 2:43 pm

Wise Sons: Inside ‘New Deli’

Posted by Rob Eshman

The pastrami smoker at San Francisco’s Wise Sons delicatessen sits wedged between a short, wooden prep counter and a window facing Mission Street. It is tall and boxy and could easily appear, to those of us who don’t come across pastrami smokers very often, to be either a small refrigerator or, perhaps, a homemade time machine.

Out of that box comes a supple hunk of peppery cured meat, which a young man sporting two arms full of tattoos carves into a row of pinkish-red slices, each crusted in pepper and cure. Using his hands and the blade of his knife, he nestles the slices between two pieces of rye bread, halves the sandwich and sets it on a plate, with a pickle.

The pastrami at Wise Sons is home-cured. That rye bread? Made earlier that morning on the very same counter (by day, a Hobart mixer the size of a bar mitzvah boy is pushed into a corner by the door). The chefs pickle their own pickles, have their lox cured and smoked nearby to their specification, bake their own rich chocolate babkas and, of course, roast the chicken and vegetables that will bubble away in their giant cauldrons of amber-colored soup.   

For generations, this is what every neighborhood deli did, and Wise Sons is finding a way to do it again. The whole place, truth be told, is a kind of time machine.

My family went there for Sunday brunch earlier this month. It’s a chaotic experience. The smell of smoked meat, chicken soup and rye embraces you like a steam sauna the instant you step inside, and the sound of a dozen frantic conversations, the shouts of the counter help and the clattering of dishes drown out your inner peace. You know you’re in a deli.

Wise Sons in San Francisco. Photo by Jay Firestone 

It’s a small place, smaller than the coffee shops and used-clothing stores that long ago began to gentrify San Francisco’s largely Hispanic Mission District. You order at a high counter — the cooks, kitchen and food are all behind it — and sit at scrunched-together tables. One wall is covered with old photos of the owners’ very Jewish-looking relatives — centuries of Beckermans, Solomons and Blooms, all looking down on you, hungry and loving. Another wall is plastered with pages from a now-defunct, Orthodox Yiddish weekly, Das Edisha Vert. The black-hatted rabbis in the photos must feel eternally taunted as they overlook plate after plate of ideal renditions of their favorite foods — none of it certified kosher. 

It was 11 a.m., but so what: We ordered the chicken soup with a matzah ball; a pastrami sandwich, a 4-by-4-inch square of noodle kugel; the L.E.O. (lox, eggs and caramelized onion) with a toasted, and home-baked, bialy; a plate of pastrami-scrambled eggs; coleslaw; an egg cream; coffee; and something called vegetable hash — caramelized onions, carrots, potatoes and Brussels sprouts topped with two fried farmers-market eggs.

I’ve now eaten at several of the country’s new-wave delis, where the food harks back to circa 1902 Lower East Side but is channeled through very modern locavore, ethically sourced sensibilities. Wise Sons stands out as the best. The pastrami has the melty tenderness of Langer’s with a beefier, richer flavor. The lox was lean and wild, and the kugel was soft as pudding. That homemade bialy could have come off an Orchard Street pushcart.

I cornered Leo Beckerman, who is the co-chef and co-owner of Wise Sons, along with his friend Evan Bloom. They met in 2003 as students at UC Berkeley, where they once threw a barbecue for 250 students at the Hillel House.

I’ve met a lot of deli owners in my time, and not one of them looks like Leo, who sports a thin hoop earring in each ear, a rasta nest of hair gathered up in a headscarf and a dreamy look in his eyes. Maybe in 20 years he’ll be paunched out, balding, swallowing Tums from the bottle and snapping at the counter help, but for now, he looks as satisfied as a Peace Corps volunteer watching the villagers eat their first successful crop.

Beckerman grew up in Los Angeles, attended the Oakwood School in North Hollywood and worked in the nonprofit world before his forays into cooking with Bloom led to Wise Sons.

“I just wanted a good pastrami,” he told me.

The two used family recipes, Joan Nathan’s cookbooks, and a lot of trial and error to come up with their menu. “No single recipe survived intact,” Beckerman said.

Wise Sons’ L.E.O. (lox, eggs and caramelized onions) with a toasted bialy. Photo by Rob Eshman

Even though his favorite L.A. deli is Brent’s, with its massive dining room and unlimited choices, Beckerman said, where he sees most delis fail is by offering too many mediocre choices in too big a room. That certainly seems to be what finished off the once-beloved Junior’s on Westwood Boulevard. So, I asked Beckerman, why not bring Wise Sons back home?

“I would love to open a deli in L.A.,” he said.

We talked about new-wave delis, and I pointed out that they tend to fall into two categories: the kind that tries to redefine, or update, the classics, stuffing their knishes with duck confit or wrapping their matzah balls in bacon. Then there’s the kind that tries to produce idealized versions, using great, local, sustainable ingredients — the way we should be eating.  At Wise Sons, the coffee, for instance, is served from the kind of giant metal tank you’d see at Camp Ramah, but its label reads “Bolivia Cenaproc,” and it is dark, fair-traded and delicious.

That’s what Wise Sons aspires to — old-fashioned food for the future — as if that pastrami smoker/time machine really could take us all backward and forward, to a past where Beckerman’s relatives ate pickles from a barrel, and to a future where their great-great-grandchildren can enjoy the same great pickles, made from the harvest of some local farms.

At Wise Sons, the time machine is working.

---

Rob Eshman is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Journal. You can follow his food writing at jewishjournal.com/foodaism and on Twitter @foodaism.

1 Comments — Leave your comment

January 29, 2013 | 12:57 pm

Wise Sons. Delicatessen in San Francisco

Posted by Rob Eshman

This column will be part of our cover story Thursday on why the New Wave deli bandwagon seems to be passing LA by. This sidebar is about my visit to Wise Sons Delicatessen in San Francisco:

The pastrami smoker at San Francisco’s Wise Sons delicatessen sits wedged between a short, wooden prep counter and a window facing Mission Street.  It is tall and boxy and could easily appear, to those of us who don’t come across pastrami smokers very often, to be either a small refrigerator or, perhaps, a homemade time machine.

Out of that box comes a supple hunk of peppery cured meat, which a young man sporting two arms full of tattoos carves into a row of pinkish red slices, each crusted in pepper and cure.  Using his hands and the blade of his knife, he nestles the slices between two pieces of rye bread, halves the sandwich and sets it on a plate, with a pickle.

The pastrami at Wise Sons is home-cured. That rye bread?  Made earlier that morning on the very same counter (by day, a Hobart mixer the size of a bar mitzvah boy is pushed into a corner by the door). The chefs pickle their own pickles, have their lox cured and smoked nearby to their specification, bake their own rich chocolate babkes and, of course, roast the chicken and vegetables that will bubble away in their giant cauldrons of amber-colored soup.  

For generations, this is what every neighborhood deli did, and Wise Sons is finding a way to do it again.   The whole place, truth be told, is a kind of time machine.

My family went there for Sunday brunch earlier this month.  It’s a chaotic experience. The smell of smoked meat, chicken soup and rye embraces you like a steam sauna the instant you step inside, and the sound of a dozen frantic conversations, the shouts of the counter help and the clattering of dishes drown out your inner peace.  You know you’re in a deli.

It’s a small place, smaller than the coffee shops and used-clothing stores that long ago began to gentrify San Francicso’s largely Hispanic Mission District.  You order at a high counter—the cooks, kitchen and food are all behind it—and sit at scrunched-together tables. One wall is covered with old photos of the owners’ very Jewish-looking relatives -- centuries of Beckermans, Solomons and Blooms, all looking down on you, hungry and loving.  Another wall is plastered with pages from a now-defunct, Orthodox Yiddish weekly, Das Edisha Vert.  The black-hatted rabbis in the photos must be eternally taunted as they overlook plate after plate of ideal renditions of their favorite foods -- none of it certified kosher.  

It was 11 a.m., but so what: We ordered the chicken soup with a matzah ball, a pastrami sandwich, a four-by-four square of noodle kugel, the L.E.O. (lox, eggs and caramelized onion, with a toasted, and home-baked, bialy), a plate of pastrami-scrambled eggs, coleslaw, an egg cream, coffee and something called vegetable hash -- caramelized onions, carrots, potatoes and brussel sprouts topped with two fried farmers-market eggs.

I’ve now eaten at several of the country’s new-wave delis, where the food harks back to the 19th-century Lower East Side but is channeled through very modern locavore, ethically-sourced sensibilities.   Wise Sons stands out as among the best.   The pastrami has the melty tenderness of Langers with a beefier, richer flavor. The lox was lean and wild, and the kugel was soft as pudding. That homemade bialy could have come off an Orchard Street  pushcart.

I cornered Leo  Beckerman. who is the co-chef and co-owner of Wise Sons, along with his friend Evan Bloom.  They met as UC Berkeley students in 2003, where they once threw a barbeque for 250 students at the Hillel House.

I’ve met a lot of deli owners in my time, and not one of them looks like Leo, who sports a thin hoop earring in each ear, a rasta nest of hair gathered up in a headscarf, and a dreamy look in his eyes.    Maybe in 20 years he’ll be paunched out, balding, swallowing Tums from the bottle and snapping at the counter help, but for now he looks as satisfied as a Peace Corp volunteer watching the villagers eat their first successful crop.

Beckerman grew up in Los Angeles, attended the Oakwood School in North Hollywood and worked in the nonprofit world before his forays into cooking with Bloom led to Wise Sons.

“I just wanted a good pastrami,” he told me.

The two used family recipes, Joan Nathan’s cookbooks and a lot of trial and error to come up with their menu.  “No single recipe survived intact,” Beckerman said.

Even though his favorite L.A. deli is Brent’s, with its massive dining room and unlimited choices, Beckerman said where he sees most delis fail is by offering too many mediocre choices in too big a room.  That certainly seems to be what finished off the once-beloved Junior’s on Westwood Boulevard.  Why not bring Wise Sons back home?, I asked Beckerman.

“I would love to open a deli in L.A.,” he said.

We talked about new-wave deli food, and I pointed out that they tend to fall into two general categories: the kind that tries to redefine, or update, the classics, stuffing their knishes with duck confit or wrapping their matzah balls in bacon. Then there’s the kind that tries to produce idealized versions, using great, local, sustainable ingredients—the way we should be eating.  Wise Sons is a redefiner.  The coffee, for instance, is served from the kind of giant metal tank you’d see at Camp Ramah, but its label reads “Bolivia Cenaproc,” and it is dark, fair-traded and delicious.

That’s what Wise Sons aspires to old-fashioned food for the future -- as if that pastrami smoker/time machine really could take us all backward and forward, to a past where Beckerman’s relatives ate pickles from a barrel, and to a future where their great-great-grandchildren can enjoy the same great pickles, made from the harvest of some local farms.

At Wise Sons, the time machine is working.

Follow me on Twitter @foodaism.

0 Comments — Leave your comment