THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 9
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM WHYTE FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
1
TABLESFORTWO
Newish Jewish
In Mimi Sheraton’s book “The Bialy
Eaters,” from 2000, she entertains, and
soundly dismisses, a theory that the bialy,
a bagel-adjacent Jewish roll, originated not
in Bialystok, Poland, but in New York. Bi-
alys—which are not boiled before they’re
baked; which have shallow depressions at
their centers instead of holes, to be filled
with onions and poppy seeds, most tradi-
tionally; and which bear a dusting of white
flour—may not have been invented here,
but is there any city in the world where it’s
easier to find them? In the nineties, on a
trip to Bialystok, Sheraton failed to locate
a single bialy. In 2022, Kossar’s, New York’s
most enduring bialy bakery, which opened
on the Lower East Side almost a century
ago, is expanding. In July, a second shop
débuted on the edge of Hudson Yards; a
third is planned for the Upper East Side.
Kossar’s has evolved considerably over
the years, as it’s changed hands. For a time,
it was certified kosher. The other day, I
was startled to see bacon on the menu at
Hudson Yards, paired with chicken salad
for a sandwich called the Houston Street.
Sandwiches can be made on bialys or on
bagels, the latter of which have become a
large part of the bakery’s output. Histor-
ically, bialys, according to Sheraton, were
not sliced at all before they were lightly
schmeared, let alone loaded with pastrami-
spiced smoked salmon and horserad-
ish-pickle cream cheese, as for the Lud-
low. There’s something a little sad about
the open-faced Grand Street—avocado
toast by another name, with a thick green
mash topped with watery tomatoes which
completely overpowers the bisected bialy.
I like my bialys sliced, but barely
adorned. Are Kossar’s as good as they
ever were? Sheraton would disapprove
of the still raw onions (and the lack of
poppy seeds) in the wells of the half-
dozen I brought home, and would find
the bread itself too pale. But toasting
and buttering one filled me with a rush
of happy nostalgia. At a point in history
when the art of Ashkenazi food seems
ever threatened, it’s heartening to see the
growth of a legacy business. Kossar’s sells
bacon but also pletzls, an Ashkenazi flat-
bread that’s larger and even scarcer than
the bialy. Russ & Daughters, that icon of
appetizing, still owned by the family that
founded it, has scaled up in recent years,
adding a house-baked bialy (with both
onions and poppy seeds), among other
things, to the repertoire.
Fine & Schapiro, a deli on West
Seventy-second Street, closed in 2020,
after ninety-three years in business, but
it was swiftly replaced by an outpost of
the Upper East Side’s Pastrami Queen, a
fully kosher establishment that changed its
name from Pastrami King when it moved
from Queens in 1998, after forty-two
years. On a recent afternoon, as the young-
est Pastrami Queen customer by about
fifty years, I enjoyed a bowl of chicken
soup with kreplach and a chocolate egg
cream. I took home some health salad and
kasha varnishkes, plus a sweatshirt bearing
the deli’s logo, the sort of old-school-New
York merch that exemplifies Zizmorcore, a
recent sartorial phenomenon that reached
its logical conclusion earlier this year,
when Coach collaborated with Zabar’s
on a five-hundred-and-fifty-dollar leather
tote emblazoned with a bagel.
The crowd was slightly younger on
the other side of Broadway, at the first
U.S. location of Sherry Herring, a kosher
shop from Tel Aviv that makes herring
downright sexy, sandwiching salt-water-
cured fillets—matjes (younger, suppler)
or schmaltz (older, meatier)—on crusty
baguettes with butter, sour cream, fresh
chili pepper, scallions, and tomatoes.
On a recent morning at Edith’s
Eatery & Grocery, in Williamsburg, a
full-service restaurant that evolved from
a pandemic pop-up, I counted three ba-
bies. The daytime-only menu explores
the Jewish diaspora: Russian pancakes,
exceptionally fluffy with farmer’s cheese;
Romanian steak and eggs; malawach,
a flaky Yemeni Jewish flatbread. On
the shelves, which enclose café tables
in charming nooks, Tam Tams crack-
ers and the individually wrapped hon-
ey-sesame candies that my grandpa used
to carry in his pocket share space with
CBD Turkish delight and bottles of av-
ocado oil, bridging the generational gap.
—Hannah Goldfield
