The city of Ashkenazi angels
Slipping into Schmaltz-mode in LA
When I travel these days, the priorities are usually on researching for the work I’ve been commissioned to write. There’s also, admittedly, an unscratchable curiosity in the edible pulse of any city that makes it unlikely I’d veer off in pursuit of yiddische vittles. But whilst my attempts to explore Ashkenazi foodways in other cities fell short, I barely even needed to try in LA.
In Paris, for example, I was working on a wine bar guide and a guide to the city’s most cutting-edge fine dining. I’d intended to squeeze in visits to Sacha Finkelsztajn and other spots in Le Marais, and write about pletzls, alfis, and other vernacular Ashkenazi culinary traditions. In the end, I just couldn’t squeeze any of that in – both temporally and inside my relentlessly saturated belly. The sublime orange blossom-kissed babka at Mamiche bakery was the only thing I could have possibly written about for the blog, but I’d wanted to write about Paris, not the pattiserisation of babka.1
In the city of angels, I was covering two things. First, the remarkable Mexican restaurant Holbox – in the context of a piece on the global rise of high-end Mexican cuisine, which also gave me an excuse to properly explore the city’s taco truck culture. Second, how Korean cuisine has become one of the city’s hottest, and the innovative ways in which it’s being pushed in new directions. I’d had plans to visit some delis and bagel spots, but they couldn’t be prioritised. I later realised that one of the restaurants I was covering was inflected with a touch of the old yiddishkeit.
I arrived at Yangban, an industrial-chic ‘Korean Americana’ restaurant in LA’s Downtown district, and was greeted by a neon pink-and-blue New Yorkian sign in the window reading
SUPER
DELI
ROTISSERIE
Yangban used to operate as a deli – serving up hot-smoked trout schmear and blue crab k-bagels, but today it’s evolved into a restaurant so good that my friend, fresh from wisdom teeth surgery, showed no restraint and opted to suffer the consequences.
The Korean-Jewish fusion aspect appears in two dishes. First, in the grilled ora king salmon which comes with a white kimchi beurre blanc, trout roe and dill, a dish which has the subtle but nonetheless palpable feeling of both Jewishness and Koreanness.
Second, ‘matzoh ball mandu soup, stuffed with Grandma Sindy’s matzoh ball, chicken broth, schmaltz.’ The dish is a tribute to Executive Chef Katianna Hong’s Jewish grandmother. The description filled me with curiosity. Briefly giving off the scent of my grandmother’s chicken soup, it swept me up and hugged me with its familiarity, and then hit me with wonder and surprise. There was an intoxicating purity to the broth, and the little puddles of schmaltz tapped against its soothing clarity in the mouth. Within it was one of the greatest kitchen frankensteins I’ve yet to encounter: part mandu, part matzo ball. I love a matzo ball as much as the next person, but when they’re sufficiently fluffy and as soft as the snare drums in Miles Davies’ Autumn Leaves – which is what you want – they’re also prone to disintegration. This unfortunately thickens the final slurps of elixir in a way you don’t want. Put it in a mandu wrapping? Problem solved! I’m not sure whether it felt at all reminiscent of the experience of eating mandu as I haven’t eaten enough of them, but it was certainly happy amongst sips of White Lotus makgeolli.
Now none of this is surface-level. It runs deep for Hong. On the way to the bathroom, I encountered the restaurant’s wall of fame, including a big new York Times piece with the title
Food is Identity. For Korean Chefs Who Were Adopted, It’s Complicated2
Hong was adopted by an Irish-Catholic mother and a German-Jewish father, and was one of many Korean children who were adopted after the Korean War left them as orphans, with Korea becoming the main source for U.S. adoption agencies.
Hong’s Korean-American food then is the result of her own hybrid experience of the world. Other adopted Koreans call what they do Korean-style, Korean-inspired, or Koreanique. To take on Korean food as their own, many such chefs have had to fight the way Korean food can remind them of loss and disconnection. Such acts of reclamation are heroic, and the way Hong’s food has taken shape is not reducible only to the openness of the city of LA, but perhaps it’s LA’s openness to Jewish food that made achieving her unique culinary style so dynamic and fluid. And this goes the other way too. Take Jonathan Gold, the Jewish Pulitzer-prize winning food journalist who encyclopedically documented LA’s diverse culinary landscape, particularly its lesser-known, vibrant underbelly. He once referred to his version of chilaquiles, which included eggs with leftover tortilla chips, salsa, sour cream and chopped herbs, as Mexican matzo brei. Like the matzoh ball mandu soup, this is the kind of creation – and utterance – that could only really be in LA. While reflecting on this, I wondered how Jewish food may have made its mark in unexpected places, but such an inquiry would be limited without an understanding of its more established effects on LA as a food city.
So it was that Yangban shook me into Schmaltz-mode, but I certainly didn’t have enough time to hit all the delis, or explore the city’s bagel-culture in-depth. One of each was all I could manage.
I first headed to Courage Bagels in between East Hollywood and Silver Lake. There was merch displayed in the windows as an eclectic range of Angelinos waited in-line. The spot is the city’s bagel trailblazer, and according to an article in Eater, one of three new wave bagel shops which are “together defining what a Southern California bagel experience is” (with Courage leading the way). The ethnicity of the Courage Bagels founders Arielle Skye and Chris Moss wasn’t mentioned in that Eater article and it didn’t need to be. You don’t need to be Jewish to open a bagel shop, just American.
Skye and Moss offer ‘~wild~ fermented, montréal/california inspired bagels,’ according to their Instagram bio, which means the bagels are handmade, naturally fermented, and take about six days to finish. We went for two. First, the open-faced Hand Sliced Smoked Salmon which came with cream cheese, tomato, red onion, caper, dill, pepper, olive, lemon and additional wild Alaskan salmon roe, with the toppings assembled over each toasted half. Second, the close-faced Summer in Sardinia, which contained spring shallot cream cheese with, less conventionally, wild sardines, as well as parsley, dill, cucumber, onion, caper, salt, pepper, olive oil and lemon, pressed between two toasted halves. They both came with gherkins alongside.
Now, I have to admit that as I was eating, I felt a little perplexed. The ingredients were fantastic, the hats are cute and it all feels very artisanal, but why go to the trouble of crafting a great bagel only to toast it? It leads me to question whether the actual bagels are any good. Yet, I have no doubt they are. After all, toasting doesn’t entirely mask quality and there was something very pleasing about the bagel’s sourdough-holes. But did I feel like I was eating a bagel? I can’t answer this with a definitive yes. LA is a great food city, but I wasn’t convinced that it needs its own bagel style.
Still, the all-Americanness of eating a bagel – a phenomenon I covered in an article for Eaten Magazine on the bagel’s de-ethnicization in New York City – still comes as a curious surprise to the Brit. I’m not saying bagels aren’t Brit-ish. You can pick up really bad ones at most supermarkets or from terrible chains like Bagel Factory. Artisanally-made ones are growing too. This isn’t just happening in Manchester and Edinburgh, as you’d expect, but even in Dartington, Devon, where the UK’s only Montreal-style bagels can be found, and Mendelsham (a town in the East of England with a population of 1500).
What about in London, where a bagel revival is in full motion, the bagel has been a feature of culinary life for many decades and eating at Beigel Bake is almost a right of passage for any Londoner?3 I’d still contend that there’s a difference. See, most of the bagel spots making up this bagel revolution are NYC-style and opened by New Yorkers. London’s vernacular bagel culture is not about revival and artisanality, but rather a story of cross-pollination. We have jerk bagels, not sourdough refits of the classic Brick Lane bagel. So for now, it’s not quite the same, and this is of course the very reason that Angelinos have begun to cultivate their own style of bagel with (too much) swagger.
Despite my mixed feelings about LA's new-wave bagels, I was still excited about the city’s Jewish food. In his book, Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of the Jewish Delicatessen, author David Sax makes the bold claim that “Los Angeles has become America’s premier deli city.” Of course, there is no way I could affirm this in one visit, even if I’d frequented every single one of them, but it did strike me as something to take notice of.
Jewish delis, originally centred in Boyle Heights – now the epicentre of many of the city’s best tacos and tostadas – followed the community's migration west, with notable establishments like Canter's, Nate 'n Al, and Langer's opening throughout L.A.
I’d been told by a reliable source to go to Canters for knish but in the end, the most important litmus test would hinge on the Langer’s deli sandwich, which Gold called ‘the best pastrami sandwich in America.’ Having not yet read this, I didn’t go with his more purist recommendation of seeded rye, pastrami and yellow mustard. The night before, I’d been told to try the No. 19 by a couple I’d had dinner with at a Korean duck barbecue restaurant Dha Rae Oak, so this was the plan.
I’d planned to go to Langers on my last day in the city (a Sunday – the day Gold called deli day and a day I associate with eating Jewish food) but I’d forgotten to check the opening times. Canters and Juniors were for deli days, but Langers, alas, was closed on Sundays. Their offshoot, Daughter’s Deli, came to the rescue, being both open and a short walk from where I was staying in West Hollywood.
I was hungover, so it was also a good time to challenge my assertion that chicken soup is never worth ordering in a restaurant. Okay, first things first, it was excellent. As I said to the friendly elderly lady who asked me how it was, “it’s not as good as my grandmas, but it’s very good.” It was very salty, in the best possible way, with a slight allium-edged flavour. The specks of schmaltz were as joy-inducing as the tiny bubbles in a good Champagne, and the carrots still had crunch. But my scepticism hadn’t been related to quality alone, but also to the oddness of eating it in a restaurant. Maybe it was the familiarity of the interaction with that lady – a feeling of the best of yiddishche warmth, as opposed to the anxiety-inducing familiarity portrayed in the film Shiva Baby – but this time, it felt right. I think the reason why is because Daughter’s is a deli, not a restaurant. Of course, I’d even said that eating it at Katz’s felt odd, but Katz is a Hudsucker Proxy-esque operation of a deli. It’s an admirable if terrifying operation. Daughter’s is small. It’s intimate. It’s heimesche.
Now to the main event. The Papa is the equivalent of Langer’s famous No. 19. It features hot pastrami, swiss cheese, coleslaw and the ideal amount of Russian dressing inside ideally-sliced rye bread (soft but cut thick enough to maintain integrity). The craftsmanship of the layering made it a better sandwich experience than Katz, and whilst the jet-black-crusted peppery slabs at Katz still linger in my mind, this meat was as tender as Bill Evan’s piano-playing and a sensational balance of fragrant, smoky, and rich. The punchy, electric gobstopper of a pickle alongside was likewise, a brilliant assault on all the senses. It was the greatest pastrami sandwich I’ve ever had, even if it isn’t the greatest pastrami sandwich in the US (next time I’ll find out for sure by actually going to Langers and splitting a No. 19 and the Gold-approved version with someone else).
“The deli is where you go to be Jewish,” Gold once wrote. “You live a secular life, but you show up at Junior’s in Los Angeles on a Sunday morning, and suddenly all your Jewish stuff comes out.” But what I also loved is that to be a deli-lover, to be an insider, your faith doesn’t matter. The couple mentioned above were of Korean heritage, and the multicultural clientele at Daughter’s was evident. As I stumbled back to my hotel, with an inflated paunch and absolute certainty about the incoming food coma, the beaming rays assuaged me. And guess what? I admired LA, and for all its deep-seated problems, in that moment, I admired America. And at the risk of sounding starry-eyed, I even felt part of it.
It also featured an earlier version of her tribute to matzo ball soup that I would love the opportunity to try one day, with the ball left to its own devices and surrounded by sujebi, all swimming in a thick and creamy seolleongtang-like broth.
It's worth reading Hester Van Hensbergen’s brilliant article on the history of the sandwich in London which describes this in more detail. It also refers to Elizabeth David, in 1959, calling her perfect Christmas day was a ‘smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed,’ which she owed to smoked salmon finally going mainstream in the 1950s, decades after European Jewish migrants began smoking Scottish salmon for bagels to place in bagels.