40 The Courier sun • march 12, 2015 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT www.couriersun.com For some, delicatessen food is close to a religious experience. A tender, crumbling cut of corned beef steeped in its juices. A full-bodied garlic dill pickle. Spicy brown mustard with grain. A blintz that melts in your mouth like a creamsicle on a summer’s day. Recipes and culinary garnishes from Hungary, Poland, Russia, Romania that flowed into late 19th and early 20th century America and soon became part of Deli Man is a Documentary film playing at the Kew Gardens Movie Theater that is deliciously entertaining. See below for a taste! an American culinary and cultural vernacular – Deli. Deli Man is a documentary film produced and directed by Erik Greenberg Anjou; the third work in his trilogy about Jewish culture. The celebrated preceding films are “A Cantor’s Tale” and “The Klezmatics - On Holy Ground,” which have to date screened at more than two hundred international film festivals and have been broadcast in the U.S., Israel, Canada and Poland. The principal guide of Deli Man is the effusive and charming Ziggy Gruber, a thirdgeneration delicatessen man, owner and maven (as well as a Yiddishspeaking French trained chef) who currently operates one of the country’s top delis, Kenny and Ziggy’s in Houston. Kenny and Ziggy’s has been touted in press reviews ranging from “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” to the L.A. Daily News. “Texas?” you ask. Shalom, y’all. Because the story of the American deli is the story of Jews – their immigration, migration, upward mobility, and western assimilation. New York may always be the most populous, celebrated and redolent Jewish node. But substantial and influential Jewish tides also flowed from Chicago to Detroit, San Francisco to L.A., and Galveston to Houston and Dallas. How this burgeoning tribe moved and thrived from city to suburb and from suburb to strip mall, and in the process created a legacy and new generations of wealth, is the sunny topside of the Jewish-American journey. The shadowy understory is how that very success engendered the deterioration of the old, traditional urban block and neighborhood – the epic synagogues, Mom and Pop storefronts, and nucleus of Jewish cultural life at which deli was the succulent heart. Of course the story of deli isn’t Ziggy’s alone. It’s the history, anecdotes and humor that once made one’s local delicatessen the virtual epicenter not only of food, but of family, laughter and community. Deli Man has visited meccas like the Carnegie, Katz’s, 2nd Avenue Deli, Nate ‘n Al and Langer’s, as well as interviewed some of the great mavens, comedians and connoisseurs of deli, including Jerry Stiller, Alan Dershowitz, Freddie Klein, Dennis Howard, Jay Parker (Ben’s Best), Fyvush Finkel, and Larry King. The documentary has also toured some of the new shining lights in the deli biz, including Wise Sons’ in San Francisco and Caplansky’s in Toronto. A successful son may with the right nurturing and enough smoked whitefish outgrow his father. In such a way, and through films like “Broadway Danny Rose” and “When Harry Met Harry and Sally,” delis have transcended their immigrant urban adolescence and become property of Broadway, Hollywood, Montreal, the world.
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