The Rise of the Designer Deli

Nothing says “New York” like a shabby shop that sells lox and bagels. But as the city’s delicatessens were threatened with extinction, a new species was unleashed.

Vicki Bodwell is an internet retail executive who moved to New York City from Texas in the late 1980s. Over breakfast recently, she told me in great detail about the very authentic bagel shop in TriBeCa where her family likes to go on Sunday mornings. As she spoke, I was thinking that there was a limit to how deep this shop’s roots could be. New York has many historically Jewish neighborhoods, but TriBeCa isn’t one of them.

The bagel shop in question, Zucker’s, is in fact the original outpost of a six-store chain, opened in 2006. And its revised approach to Jewish cuisine — the bagels are hand-rolled, but you can get them with bacon — is part of a broader trend in which all forms of ethnic food are regarded as the raw material for 21st-century artisanal tinkering.

New York, of course, was once a checkerboard of Jewish neighborhoods, and every such enclave had one or more kosher delis upholding Orthodox dietary strictures in which meat and dairy must be kept separate and pork products are banned. By one count, New York had upward of 1,500 Jewish delis in the 1930s, which dwindled into the 10s in recent decades. The change was largely caused by demographics; the city’s Jewish population peaked at roughly 2 million circa 1950 and was half that by the early 1980s. The traditional delis were also undercut by changing attitudes toward their mainstays: fat, carbohydrates and salt.