Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on October 27, 2021

Ralph Lauren meets Moroccan souk meets your grandmothers house. Thats the vibe of the new location of Ediths, a speciality grocery store and sit-down eatery serving traditional dishes from Jewish communities all around the world, reinterpreted.

Take, for instance, their pasta amatriciana, which substitutes beef tongue for cured pork cheek, just like they did in the Roman Jewish ghetto. Then Ediths soaks the beef in milknot so Roman Jewish ghetto.

Its your great-great-great grandmothers cooking, 34-year-old chef-owner Elyssa Heller said. But with a twist.

The restaurant and supermarket will open in Williamsburg next month.

Ediths, in its current iteration as a grab-and-go sandwich counter, also in Williamsburg, is named for Hellers great aunt who ran a Jewish delicatessen in Brooklyn in the 1950s and serves what Heller calls global Jewish diaspora food, combining Levantine, Middle Eastern, and North African fare along with deli standards brought to the U.S., or at least popularized here, by Jewish immigrants.

Ediths bodega sandwich: latke, cheese, bacon and egg

The counter pushes up against all expectations: the restaurant opened as a pop-up six months into a pandemic, in a male-dominated industry, its run by women, and its far from kosher.

Ediths first opened in August 2020 as a pop-up in Greenpoint, hosted at Paulie Gees pizzeria pizza ovens were a key ingredient for executing Hellers vision for wood-fired bagels. It then opened a permanent location in Williamsburg in April this year. The pop-up opened when nearly 90% of New York City bars and restaurants couldnt make rent, but boasted hour-plus lines snaking down the street and sold out each day.

Traditionally, U.S. delis have served Ashkenazi Jewish food. Rare was the deli that offered hummus alongside herring. But at Ediths sandwich counter, patrons can order The Maghreb, a sandwich with Moroccan merguez lamb sausage and harissa, served on a raisin bagel with raisins soaked in arak. Heller said the touch of sweetness is a nod to Moroccan tagine.

You can order sabich, the Iraqi fried eggplant and boiled egg sandwich, as well as a bagel and lox.

When people think about Jewish food, its Ashkenazi food or its Israeli food. But theres so much from around the entire Jewish diaspora, Heller, a Chicago native, said. There was just a lot of storytelling that I felt like was being missed.

To help execute her vision to explore the classics in a new way, Heller, whos worked in the food industry for over a decade, including for Momofukus Milk Bar, hired Christina Jackson, former chef de cuisine at Tetsu in Tribeca. The female duo found unexpected synergies between Jacksons culinary background a career chef from Tokyo and San Francisco trained in sushi and the smoked fish Heller wanted to serve.

But if theres one menu star, its the Instagrammable BECL bacon, egg, and cheese bagel with a latke. The homage to the venerated New York bodega sandwich flouts pretty much every rule of the halachic laws of eating: pork, milk and cheese, all in one big bite.

That dish begs the question: just what is Jewish food and does a bacon-bagel sandwich stretch it beyond the breaking point?

The menu at Ediths documents the ever-evolving nature of Jewish food

That to me is anathema, said Tina Wasserman, culinary historian and author of Entree to Judaism: A Culinary Exploration of the Jewish Diaspora.

Wasserman said that while a Reuben sandwich, with its pastrami and Swiss cheese, might get a pass as Jewish cuisine, bacon is a hard no.

I mean, that shows no respect for the different foods of the diaspora. Just because theyre sticking it on a bagel doesnt cut it, thank you very much, she said. Dont call it Jewish food.

According to Wasserman, Jewish diaspora cuisine is food from any region of the world that conforms to kashrut and the laws of Shabbat. Whether its chicken chitarnee, an Indian Jewish curry, or borscht from Russia, she said what constitutes Jewish cooking is that the recipes are sans pork and dont combine meat and milk.

But unlike other restaurants that intentionally defy kosher law, like Traif in Williamsburg, whose name translates to non-kosher in Yiddish, Ediths is not so much a shrine to pork as it is an invitation to global Jewish fare.

The eatery dips in and out of tradition.

For Passover, the Ediths staff cranked out wood-fired shmurah matzah flat and round along with their famous bagels (bread crumbs swept out between batches). A few streets over, Orthodox communities burned chametz, foods with leavening agents that are verboten during the holiday. It was a cheeky move for the new deli on the block.

For Thanksgiving, Ediths will offer schmaltzy chicken pot pie. Pie has never been a dessert for Jewish holidays or celebrations, the restaurant posted on social media, but everyone eats pie on Thanksgiving. For Christmas, expect a special menu of turnip and edamame fried rice with crispy spring rolls, honoring the century-old Jewish ritual of eating Chinese food for Christs birth. For Purim, Ediths celebrated with crown-shaped halva croissants to laud Queen Esther shifting the focus away from male villain Haman, whose hamantaschen typically outshines other culinary representations.

I thought that we could be this new voice in an industry that hasnt seen a lot of change, Heller said.

Part of that change comes down to whos running the show. Of the 460,000 chefs and head cooks in the United States, 77.6 percent are male, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For big name U.S. restaurant operators, the gender gap is even wider: women occupy less than 7 percent of head chef positions, according to a Bloomberg study that analyzed 15 prominent restaurant groups. Even rarer is the Jewish female restaurateur, a role Heller and her late great aunt Edith share.

Edith Heller ran her Brooklyn deli called Franks Delicatessen after the previous owner, a name she kept from 1949-1953.

She hated it, Elyssa Heller said. It was back-breaking labor. She ended up closing up shop and moving to Florida.

Women always played a large role in day-to-day operations of American Jewish delis, according to Ted Merwin, Judaic studies historian and author of Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli. They cooked, they managed the cash register, and once takeaway stores turned into restaurants with tables, they served lunch and washed dishes.

But were there women who actually opened the deli all by themselves? No, not that many, Merwin said.

The grueling hours of the restaurant industry meant arduous labor for women running a business and taking care of a family in an era when many dining establishments only served men.

And what about the bacon on the bagel?

Thats nothing new, he said.

As Jews have become increasingly more secular, fewer and fewer observe kosher laws, and, Merwin said, most Jewish delis now cater to a mostly non-Jewish clientele. The pattern started with delicatessens in New York Citys theater district, where Jews who worked in the entertainment industry tended to be less religious. Their secularism was reflected in the non-kosher offerings at the delis around Broadway.

Though the U.S. restaurant industry tanked during the Great Depression, Jewish delis thrived. According to Merwin, with 1,550 kosher delicatessens across the five boroughs of New York City at the height of the Great Depression, the deli was a rare Depression-era success story. Delis doubled as a lunchtime spot for an affordable meal as well as a gathering space for Jews to lean on one another in times of hardship.

And like these delis, Ediths is flourishing. Hand-twisted and wood-fired Polish-style obwarzanek krakowski keep Brooklyners coming back and lining up down the block while restaurants are closing in droves.

Like the delis of the 1930s, Heller says she made a point to price Ediths competitively, if not under what some other restaurants charge.

Ediths wood-fired sourdough bagels

When I first moved to New York I was homesick and always wanted a bagel with lox from Russ & Daughters but I could never afford to spend, like, $16, she said.

The Ediths version, topped with homemade cultured cream cheese and in-house smoked salmon, will set you back $10.50, or $14.25 with the works.

Heller, who started her restaurant on an act of faith, unsure if people would get it, has been blown away by the response to Ediths, that people are excited about her vision, that she generated enough interest to open her own sandwich counter and now a second location in an economic depression.

Food is humanity, Heller, who is soon launching a zine with stories and recipes from the Ediths community, said. Its been a bright spot in a really tough time.

The soon-to-open food hall and market will have a prepared foods section, bakery, deli counter, full espresso program, and sit-down restaurant with Ashkenazi classics, consumer food products made by Jewish Mexican women, Indian Jewish goods and every Jewish diaspora group in between.

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The new Edith's redefines Jewish food with bacon and bagel sandwiches, sabich and shmaltzy pot pie - Forward

Category: Jewish Cuisine
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