Deep Dish Fran Kritz

Deep Dish

Love in the Afternoon: Lunch at Russ and Daughters at New York’s Jewish Museum

By: Fran Kritz

Editor’s note appended.

I’ve been in love with Russ and Daughters, a 102-year-old appetizing store on New York’s Lower East Side, for decades. And that was without ever eating a morsel of their food. Now having lunched—three times in six weeks–– at the store’s newest (and first kosher) outpost at the Jewish Museum a few miles uptown, that love is finally requited. And worth the wait.

Russ and Daughters at the Jewish Museum (museum admission fee not required for restaurant diners) 1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street Kashrut under National Kosher Supervision For more information: 212.475.4880, extension 3 info@russanddaughters.com http://russanddaughters.com/ jewishmuseum/

How can you fall in love with a food store without taking a taste? Credit Calvin Trillin, the longtime writer for The New Yorker magazine. It’s not just how deliciously Trillin has always shared his Russ and Daughters shopping list with his readers— smoked salmon with slices he describes as “thin enough to read a newspaper through,” fresh cream cheese and baked farmer cheese. Through Trillin’s pen, the food, clearly delicious, almost seemed to come in second to Trillin’s shopping experiences at Russ and Daughters, often with his two daughters in tow.

In “The Magic Bagel,” an essay Trillin wrote for The New Yorker in 2000, Trillin says transactions at Russ and Daughters “took some time since the daughters (of Joel Russ, the founder…) had to quit slicing fish…to tell me in glorious detail how adorable my girls were.” In fact, “The Magic Bagel” is about Trillin’s quest—with an assist from Mark Russ Federman, then the owner of the store–– to track down a type of bagel one daughter enjoyed as a child in the loving hope that it might lure her back home from a job, a good one, in San Francisco.

And in “Tepper Isn’t Going Out,” Trillin’s 2003 novel about a man who continually finds the best parking spots in New York City, one such spot is right smack in front of, you guessed it, Russ and Daughters. Hard not to share Trillin’s devotion, even without a soupcon of sable, when hanging, behind glass at the Russ and Daughters Café (not kosher) on Orchard Street, around the corner from the original store on East Houston Street, is a shopping bag, decades old and lox stain intact, that Trillin presented to the current owners and Russ great grandchildren Niki Russ Federman and Josh Russ' Tupper, when they opened the café in 2014. Love indeed. Who wouldn’t fall in love with a food store that tells its patrons: “All orders are to be placed at least 3-5 days in advance, unless in the event of a funeral/shiva.”

So, imagine my delight when friends on Facebook announced the opening of the first kosher Russ and Daughters enclave several months back. Worth going to? The lines don’t lie. And neither does the menu. You can get the requisite nova and schmear, sold here as “boards”

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