Deli Man the documentary
Someone gives a shout out as the lights come up at the Laemmle’s on Santa Monica Boulevard after the movie, “Deli Man.”
“So where we gonna eat?!”
Okay, that was me. Such a delicious picture makes me hungry, natch.
Izzy’s in Santa Monica is the closest delicatessen to Laemmle’s, but the manager at the theatre hands us slips saying Lenny’s in Westwood (formerly Junior’s) is offering “a free dessert” with your ticket stub.
Free food, from a deli? We have to go.
“Deli Man” is a nostalgic trip through the dwindling number of fresser fortresses in the USA — 150 Jewish delis remain, according to the film. A documentary featuring kreplach-making, commentary by the brilliant author of “Born To Kvetch,” Michael Wex (calling schmaltz “the WD-40 of Jewish cooking”) and good old Jerry Stiller storytelling hit my shweet shpot. Also I enjoyed the footage of really nice-looking Nova being sliced like so and mass quantities of chubby whitefish from Lake Superior going through a de-scaling machine before heading into the smokehouse alongside a Brooklyn waterfront.
The film centered around a hardworking Houston deli owner named Ziggy Gruber, while taking us inside a few landmark delis in the East. And of course it featured the Carnegie and Stage delis, too.
But how could “Deli Man” leave out Langer’s, home of L.A.’s finest pastrami sandwich? Folks, this delight, known as “The #19,” also happens to be served in Saul’s Deli in Berkeley as a tribute to Langer’s. You’ve heard of sandwiches named after comedians, but named after other sandwiches? That’s pretty special, but the doc’s length did not permit the secret of Langer’s double-baked rye, alas…
Director Eric Greenberg Anjou did give some naches to classic L.A. delis like Nate ‘n Al’s and Canter’s. (Funny, it turns out that Al came from Detroit, where he ran a deli on 12th Street, Boesky’s, where my parents used to pray in the 1940s) We were also treated to the fusion-style nouvelle-gribbeness of Wise Sons Deli in San Francisco. And most hamishe of all had to be Caplansky’s in Toronto, where the owner reaches out to the community with open mic nights and drives a food truck displaying the slogan: “SOMETIMES YOU JUST GOTTA JEW IT UP!”
Caplansky said he was out to reclaim the word “Jew,” apparently in reference to Canadian anti-Semitism?
At the end of the movie, they did one of those scenes showing a map of the U.S. Thousands of delis marked as dots began disappearing as the years pass until there are less than two hundred left. But I saw zero dots over Ann Arbor Michigan—home to the great Zingerman’s Deli— so the doc’s survey couldn’t have been accurate, could it?
“Smell the love,” Ziggy in Houston says directly to the camera, wafting his arms above a gigantic pot of matzo balls.
Here’s a film in need of smellovision. It also reminded me of the line Irving Brecher used to say entering Label’s Tables or Langer’s: “I know I’m here when I can smell the Jews.”
Which reminds me of another major drawback in “Deli Man”: only a couple decent jokes about delicatessens! They easily left a couple dozen sitting on the table, including Milton Berle’s definitive, “Any time somebody orders a corned beef sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise, somewhere in the world a Jew dies.”
* * *
So our “free dessert” at Lenny’s in Westwood turns out to only be for cake.
“No pie, no ice cream,” the waiter tells us. And when I ask him if I can have the cake a la mode, he says: “What is that?”
Yeah, there was a catch, natch.
But, being a deli, it was a funny one.
