Chinese Pastrami, Jewish Fried Rice
Chinese Pastrami, Jewish Fried Rice
Nevertheless, apart from one or two topnotch Chinese restaurants, all the Chinese food is pretty much the same, maybe not the same food served in my childhood's Amherst, but homogenized: lo mein and chow mein and egg fu yung replaced by General Tso's chicken, orange beef, Phoenix and Dragon...and who would or could go now to a delicatessen? There are a few uptown, maybe Barney Greengrass or Carnegie Delicatessen, and Katz's and Ratner's, the Manhattan occupied by Isaac Bashevis Singer, with old men in cafeterias devouring jello topped with whipped cream; the 1960s Woody Allen New York, all, for the most part, vanished...and how my mother would talk (still talks) about the cheesecake at Lindy's, the walnut-and-cream-cheese sandwich (five cents) at Chock Full O'Nuts.
Daily I passed the Grand Deli. This was on my way to my kid's school, on Grand St., in a peculiar no-man's land of housing projects, bleak 60s cement-block old-age and lower-income housing, some big prison-like public schools. The few tenements of the Lower East Side here dwindle into shamed heaps. Rows and streets of tenements maybe can cling together and show some fortitude. But take just one or two houses?on their own?and they resemble elderly, embarrassed wrecks. It is in this region on the borders of Chinatown and what was once a turn-of-the-century Jewish area that the two worlds collide. There is so little left of each?a few Chinese restaurants that couldn't fit into the main part of Chinatown, the last remains of the old Jewish community (a few kosher butchers, a bakery). These fragments of Jewish/Chinese worlds are cemented together with Hispanic bodegas, pizzerias, fast-fried chicken.
For a long time I couldn't bring myself to enter the Grand Deli, with its logo of a dill pickle wearing a Chinese coolie hat. On occasion I'd peer through the curtain into a long narrow room of diners?early diners, maybe 6, 7 o'clock?and then, once when I did go into the entrance side, was frightened of the huge vats (behind glass) of coleslaw, stuffed cabbage, great haunches of pink meats, lolling tongues, noodle kugels, food that to me was not alien but...from another age. I might have gotten something to go, but above the food hung the sign "No Take Out Orders After 4:30."
When was one supposed to get a takeout order, I wondered. In any event, the sign vanished. I mustered my courage, as well, and went in, early, with my kid (who was raised for several years by Chinese nannies and who is Chinese), ordered for her?from the Chinese waiter?wonton soup and steamed dumplings (here known as dim sum, which, perhaps mistakenly, I had thought was a variety of things)?then perused the menu...
Was I going to have The Original Sino-Jewish Steak (a $19.95 "tenderloin steak broiled with our world famous Chinese barbecue sauce with fried rice")? The Fong Wan Gai?"twin boned breasts of chicken stuffed with hickory smoked pastrami, dipped in egg batter, gently fried, then topped with our finest Chinese vegetables"? Was I going to try an appetizer of chicken fricassee (for, perhaps, the first time since the death of my grandmother in New Jersey, many years ago, who could make great chicken fricassee?that is, when she wasn't experimenting by adding something to it like strawberry jam)?
While I waited the pickles came, and the coleslaw, and some of those crispy things?I forget what they're called?you get in some Chinese restaurants, with a big soup bowl full of the marmalade-colored sauce.
And so I ate the pickles, one after the next, mulling the difference between dill and half-sour, while my kid devoured the orange-colored fried noodles. And, to be honest, that probably would have been enough of a meal for us. A couple of other people came in and ordered off the Chinese side of the menu. It was a big effort for them to order the plain white rice instead of the fried rice (I could tell because they made whimpering noises, and looked around, brightly, at the empty room, as if they would be applauded for adhering to some invented diet), and then an order came in?to go?that was for some reason announced over a loudspeaker, an incredibly complex and bizarre series of things like salami-fried rice and a fried-potato knish. Enough food was being ordered for about 40 people. Maybe someone was having a party. On the menu, under "Something of Interest..." it stated that Sweet Sixteen parties could be held at this place, and they had always been memorable successes, because of the Chinese specialties.
This part of the menu then went on to explain "How to Order in Chinese":
"It is customary to start with the soup. Following the soup, and while the main course is being prepared, one enjoys the appetizers...after that, the main courses are followed by dessert. We advise ordering several different dishes to share with your companions so that everyone gets a delicious taste."
But when was the last time Americans would have needed this information? Maybe 1965? There wasn't a single town left, in all of the USA, that didn't have a strip mall in which was located a China Moon Buffet, all you can eat, $4.95. And even for those who kept kosher, strictly kosher, for whom Chinese food might be exotic, it was probable that they could figure out?with the headings being "appetizer," "main course" and "dessert"?that the dessert course was not going to come first.
The only other Chinese menu that had made me feel this kind of...nostalgia...had been up at Bruce Ho's Four Seas, on E. 57th St., where on one side of the menu drinks were listed, cocktails like Rob Roys and gimlets, and the dishes were things like lobster Cantonese, and at the bottom of the menu it said, "for our gentlemen friends?steak/lamb chops" (or something to that effect, I'm quoting from memory, but I always had the feeling that some big guy, hair slicked back, from an overdone movie, would sit next to me and say, "What is all this stuff? Don't they got a steak or something a guy can eat here?").
And the other thing I couldn't figure out was why I felt so...peculiar. Finally it dawned on me, there was no noise, no blaring music, no dark lights, the room was bright, quiet, I wasn't haplessly stabbing a fork into throbbing darkness, I could see and hear?in a restaurant! A miracle! A mitzvah! Maybe I had really found some little time tunnel or hole into an earlier era, I decided. I did not have the courage to try the knobel wurst or the potted meatballs or the pastrami polonaise; I didn't even want to try the Jumbo Special Combination Sandwich (Slim Lou's Delight: corned beef, chopped liver and salami, cole slaw, $10.95). I ordered, plain and simple, pastrami on rye.
My child was happily eating the wontons out of the wonton soup, great sheets of folded dough each with a thumbnail-sized dollop of hamburger. My sandwich arrived: mustardless, a tower of pink meat with peppery brown edges?I found a squeeze bottle of mustard on the table and squirted it on, added the remaining coleslaw and pickles, raised it to my mouth and?I couldn't stop myself now, I practically inhaled it...took one huge bite, monstrous, irresistible and yet my tremendous mouthful did not diminish the pink castle on my plate in any way...
My sandwich, with personality; an elegy to fat and salt; there is something so perfect about this, too salty, too much meat, the bread, the mustard, a transfusion via mouth to a time I had never really known; a New York almost completely vanished but that still existed?faintly, genteel?in movies and the pages of books...