Lucky Peach 4
Summer 2012
The first restaurant I ever loved was a deli in Miami called Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House. A short drive away from the apartment where my grandparents lived during the winter, it opened in 1954, and maintained from then on the midcentury look of the kind of place where Frank Sinatra would eat after a show (which he did). Part New York–style deli, part diner, it had red vinyl booths, fluorescent lights, and Formica tabletops. They served Russian-Jewish food—pastrami, chicken soup, and chopped liver. Everything was good, but I didn’t love it for the food. I loved it because I went there with my grandfather.
It was my grandfather who taught me what’s important about restaurants: that they are places in which to escape from the world, places where people can feel brighter, wealthier, happier than they really are. For cooks, I would later discover, they are a kind of shelter, obliterating everything outside of them and replacing the void with a reality of their own. For me, even now, the front door of a restaurant is a looking glass, and on the other side lies the promise of a better life.
There’s much I don’t remember about my childhood, but I still dream about breakfast at the Rascal House. On those mornings, already eager with anticipation, I’d open my eyes to see my grandfather standing next to the folding door that separated our sleeping area from the rest of the living room, as if he had materialized out of thin air. I would slip out of bed quietly, and we would walk to the car in near darkness, the already-warm air sweet with the scent of gardenias. Then we would drive through nondescript suburban sprawl under a brightening sky, toward the wide causeways of northern Miami.
The sign would appear first, towering over the low-slung building, with the Rascal, a glowing, eerily disembodied head, perched on top. No matter how early we were, there would be a line. If we were lucky, it would only be about twenty feet out the door and around the corner. If we weren’t, it would stretch for a city block. And every time, my grandfather, whom we called Papa, would sigh. He was not a terribly patient person, eternally fidgeting, shifting his weight from one foot to another and jingling the change in his pocket. I never minded the wait, though, because it gave us more time together. “How’s my favorite grandson?” he used to ask me, with his big smile and eyes that glittered and danced. I’d shrug and look away, but still I’d hold that moment close, like a treasure.
Inside the restaurant there were more lines, organized by party size and separated by waist-high stainless steel chutes. Regulars struck up conversations as they waited—about the weather, their arthritis, their wayward children. It was a rare day when Papa didn’t see someone he knew.
The large dining room space beyond, when we finally made it that far, was filled with booths and tables on one side and a diner-style counter on the other, where we often sat. The walls were covered with pictures of celebrities who had eaten at the restaurant, and cheeky aphorisms: As I see it, there are two kinds of people in this world: people who love delis and people you shouldn’t associate with.
At the Rascal House, portions were generous and flavors big. At breakfast the tables were set with baskets of Danish and rolls to snack on; at lunch, the sweets morphed into jars of pickles. The menu, bright yellow and huge, could have served as a caution flag on a raceway. There were endless choices: matzo brei, pickled herring, borscht, latkes fried in chicken fat and butter. It was peasant food, earthy and visceral. To me, it was the taste of home.
My mother’s family were Russian Jews who fled the pogroms at the beginning of the twentieth century. People like them came to America by the thousands in those days, escaping the violence in Odessa and Minsk and the little towns that dotted the countryside. Waves of refugees washed onto the shores of Manhattan and dispersed in clusters along the East Coast. My great-grandparents arrived in 1909, settled in Massachusetts, and gradually assimilated into American society. They had kids. Made some money. The kids grew up, got a little too comfortable, and, when they inevitably wearied of the harsh New England winters, turned their gazes south.
The city was barely born when the snowbirds, as they came to be called, began to arrive. Slowly at first, and then faster after the First World War, East Coast Jews and others developed the beachfront, and Miami became a winter hangout for well-heeled New Yorkers. Though the NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED signs stayed up for many years, the diaspora of aging first-generation refugees, whose memories were still fresh with the horrors that they had left behind, were able to make a community for themselves. They built hotels and businesses, synagogues in which to worship, and delis that reminded them of the food they had grown up with. The Rascal House, probably the most famous of these, occupied a one-story building designed in Miami Modern style, with an awning that stretched above two long, windowed walls. Founded by Wolfie Cohen, a one-time busboy who moved to Miami and started a string of successful restaurants, the Rascal House played to a big audience.
It was a home away from home for the locals who came regularly to eat and catch up, many of whom lived in boarding houses with no kitchens. The elderly on fixed incomes came for the early-bird breakfasts and dinners, and the tourists came for sandwiches piled high with pastrami and corned beef. It was a showy place, with an open kitchen and glass display cases always filled with lavish spreads of salads and desserts. Open twenty-four hours, it became a late-night dinner and cocktail hangout for celebrities and hipsters. It was a success from the moment it opened, and when my grandfather started taking me, it was still at the height of its popularity, feeding thousands of people a day.
We went to the Rascal House often for lunch, sometimes for dinner, usually with the whole family. It was Americanized ethnic food, full of big gestures, its forms distorted and grandiose. The sandwiches bordered on the grotesque: thick pieces of bread packed with a fist of cooked meat. It was there that I learned to order the meat sliced from the fattiest section of the muscle, and to add a piece of tongue for extra richness. I loaded my sandwiches with grainy mustard and pickled cabbage to cut through the mouthful of hot animal fat, the toasted bread and caraway drifting on top like a perfume. I still crave that intensity, the balance built on concentration, fat, and whiplash acidity, delivered like a gut punch.
I recognized many of those big gestures, that showmanship and charisma, in Papa. At a proud five feet, four inches, the guy could really command a room, always entering in a flurry of kisses and handshakes. He was a patriarch who led with charm rather than power, and the reason that his offspring all lived within a thirty-minute radius of my grandparents’ apartment in Massachusetts when I was growing up. He was constantly on the phone, settling feuds and patching over rough spots among his brood. I can still hear him saying, “That’s not nice!”, his voice rising at the end to punctuate the admonition. He always seemed surprised that there was so much not-niceness in the world, and especially within his family. But he did what he could. My grandparents, who married at eighteen and nineteen years old, managed to stay together for seventy-five years, in large part because of his good nature.
That generosity of spirit was palpable. One time I made an offhand comment about liking a certain kind of cookie that my grandparents had. I forgot all about it until the next time I visited. When I arrived, Papa took me immediately to a cupboard and opened the door, behind which were shelves stacked high with boxes of those cookies, far more than I could ever eat. He didn’t do anything halfway. This tendency toward excess led him in other directions as well, like the vodka that went into his orange juice in the morning, and his steady diet of steaks and fully loaded baked potatoes that landed him in the hospital at age seventy-five for six heart bypasses. He lived almost twenty years after that, without ever changing his diet.
His appetites largely drove the choices of restaurants we went to. If it wasn’t the Rascal House, then it was certain we would find ourselves at a place that served steak, potatoes, and whiskey. It was equally certain that there would be an early-bird special. At 5 p.m. sharp—he was never late—we would arrive at whatever restaurant he’d picked, usually a once-swank place with worn carpets, paintings of whaling ships on the walls, and a quality of light that might be compared unfavorably to a mausoleum’s. None of it dampened my enthusiasm. Papa sat at the head of the table, and I sat next to him. The first thing he would do was order a Manhattan, and he always gave me the cherries—at least three, sometimes more. It was part of our ritual, and I grew to crave their plasticine texture and manufactured cherry taste, like bourbon-flavored cough syrup. I usually ordered the steak and baked potato, like he did. He taught me how to season the potato by slashing across the flesh to score it, mashing it with a fork, and then mixing in butter, salt, and pepper. Only when the potato was properly seasoned would I add the sour cream on top.
For every year as far back as I can remember, we visited my grandparents in Florida. By the time we stepped off the plane, into air the temperature and viscosity of bathwater, Papa was already waiting at the curb. With the air-conditioning cranked and Lawrence Welk playing softly on the radio, he would drive us to their little apartment in a tall building full of other apartments. It had floral wallpaper and pink terry-cloth toilet seat covers. We swam in the pool and the ocean. We played miniature golf, shuffleboard, and long games of Scrabble. We went out to dinner often, and we’d always visit the Rascal House at least once.
In truth, I spent much of my time in Miami bored, my head stuck in a book. I never understood the attraction—the languid energy and constant feeling of retirement pressing in, of too much empty space. As if to drive home the point, every morning Papa would read the obituaries while we sat together at breakfast. I told him once that it seemed morbid to me, and he looked surprised. “How else will I know if one of my friends has died?” he asked.
He did have an astonishing number of friends, and he outlasted almost all of them. He also outlasted his savings. My grandparents lived well—especially later in life—because of my great-grandmother, Sarah Katz. Sarah never learned to read or write English, but she came to understand American business quite well. She started as a janitor when she arrived in the country, while her husband opened a cabinetry shop. She invested their earnings in real estate, and by the time she died she owned several apartment buildings in downtown Cambridge, the value of which today would support the entire extended family quite nicely.
Of course, those buildings and the fortune she amassed are long gone. Papa’s generosity was equaled only by his talent for squandering money. In the decades after Sarah’s death, he kept spending. He paid for vacations and summer camp for the kids and grandkids, and sent checks to every family member on every birthday. He flew us down to Miami and bought our meals. He lent money to friends, and invested in businesses that quickly failed, including his own. And then, one day, it was gone. My grandparents sold their condo in Florida and moved back to Massachusetts, where their kids wondered what to do with their aging and now destitute parents.
I lost track of them for a while. By the time I graduated from high school, my parents had long since divorced, and family trips of any kind had become awkward. After an abortive attempt at college, I moved as far away as I could, to California. I got married and then unmarried. I kept in touch with the family, more or less, but I was already deep in the cooking game and getting deeper, which relieved me (at least in my mind) of the obligation to pay much attention to anything or anyone else. Restaurants, which had started as an escape from the discomfort of the world, became my entire existence.
About ten years ago, I brought my then-girlfriend Alexandra to meet my grandparents. They were still living in their own apartment, each of them a spry ninety-something years old. I took them to a restaurant that I remembered from when I was a kid, a place on the water in Marblehead, which looked largely the same as it had twenty years earlier. Papa sat at the head of the table and ordered a steak and a Manhattan. When the drink arrived, I waited. I was, at age thirty-three, still completely certain of what was going to happen next. When he pulled the cherry out of his drink in midsentence and popped it into his mouth, my jaw must have dropped. “Aaach!” he said, when he realized what had happened. “We need more cherries!” He flagged down the nearest server, and when she arrived, Papa didn’t take just one. He grabbed a fistful out of the glass on her tray, dunked them several times in his drink, and shoved them at me expectantly, a familiar gesture of absolution mingled with love.
When their health started to fail, my grandparents moved to an assisted-living home. I was in between restaurants that summer, with plenty of time on my hands, so I went to see them one last time. It was perfectly nice, as those places go, with manicured lawns and freshly painted walls. Their minds were still sharp, but they seemed depressed. I helped Papa into his wheelchair; he squirmed, frustrated by his immobility. We sat in the room for a few hours and they told me stories of their childhood and mine until they eventually grew tired. I left feeling sad and helpless.
Nana went first, but not by much. I flew out for the funeral. I remember walking into a synagogue for the first time in decades, shaking off the rain that came down the entire time I was there. The family was all present, but I was there to see Papa. I sat near the front and watched him during the service, with his little black hat and an embroidered prayer shawl covering his thinning shoulders. His eyes were still, lifeless. Afterward he held me close when we embraced, but I could tell that he was already gone. He died within a few weeks.
The Rascal House passed a few years later. Death by condominium development was the official cause, but it had been a long time coming. The old delis and the way of life that they represented had been on the wane for many years. The first-generation immigrants from Russia had died off, replaced by American Jews who felt less and less connected to their ancestry. Meanwhile, starting in the fifties, Cuban immigrants escaping their country’s communist regime began to reshape the city. As the population turned toward Central and South America, Spanish began to supplant English as Yiddish once had, and the language of restaurants changed as well.
“Their food is unhealthy,” many people now say of the old delis. “It’s of middling quality.” But that misses the point: it was never cuisine as art. It was food to assuage hungers both physical and spiritual, to buffer and embrace a group of people who were trying to find their place in the world. It spoke in earthy timbres of sustenance and survival. As the snowbirds passed on, they were replaced by a new generation, Americans at heart, with little use for the past.
I found out about the Rascal House’s closing through a newspaper article. “We waited as long as we could,” said the new owners. They dismantled the place, selling the decor as mementos. The restaurant was stripped bare, its pieces carted off and shipped around the country. I imagine platters and saltshakers sitting in cabinets and closets, gradually chipping or gathering dust; the pictures and signs arranged on dressers in spare rooms, propped on mantelpieces or packed carefully in boxes. Perhaps, somewhere, the Rascal still lives, in some basement, behind a pool table covered in boxes of out-of-date magazines, its neon quietly flickering in an empty room.
No Comments