The Deli Days of San Francisco

My dad and I eating pastrami at Langer’s Delicatessen in Los Angeles.

My first assignment for my graduate Food Writing class was to interview an elder member of my family about their foodways growing up. My dad grew up in the rock ‘n’ roll days of San Francisco, in a fantastically diverse neighborhood, so I was delighted at the opportunity to interview my own father and have an excuse to ask loads of questions. What I got was a fabulous account of the culinary landscape of an immigrant community, a time before fast food was ubiquitous in urban centers, and a better understanding of why my dad loves pastrami so much. Here’s the story…

I have never eaten a roast beef sandwich in San Francisco. My dad, on the other hand, has a mountain of childhood memories in the shape of the rotund roasted meat sliced to perfection and dripping with jus, served on San Francisco’s iconic sourdough. His name is Daniel and everyone I know calls him Dan, but he was Danny then, so that’s what I’ll call him here. When I asked him about the foodways of his childhood, Danny immediately began recounting lunches at his two favorite neighborhood delis – one Italian and one Jewish. He claims that he preferred the Italian deli because that roast beef was unbeatable, but he lights up when he talks about the Jewish deli owner letting him sink his hand, so long as it was clean, into the giant jar of house-made dill pickles to grab one. He had a lot of friends from the suburbs that waxed on about their hamburger stands, and it made Danny feel envious when he thought of his humble, “city kid” roast beef on sourdough with a pickle. When he finally got his hands on one of those hamburgers, though, he was terribly disappointed. It was, perhaps, the moment he recognized the level of quality and craftsmanship that went into his favorite sandwich, a symbol of the food businesses that were created with the primary goal of sharing their best products and beloved heritage cooking with their community.

Community is the key word here – it wasn’t just the place you lived, it was the unique set of people that felt like family, people that relied on each other for food, friendship, and routine. Community was the baker who would trade Danny a box of freshly baked donuts for his extra paper on a 5:30 a.m. newspaper route. It was the butcher that kept a tab for the Kennedy family so that they could settle up later for the list of things that Danny’s mother, Irene, sent him to pick up. It was Leo, the grocer who left the business to charter a commercial fishing boat and share the extra catch with his friends. On occasion, Leo would invite those friends to join him on the boat, do some fishing, drink some Bloody Marys, and they’d all go home with a salmon or two. Someone they knew by name delivered glass bottles of fresh milk topped with paper caps to their doorstep. Once a year, the family would pile into the station wagon to head to a ranch in Petaluma where they’d buy beef and lamb in bulk from a rancher/butcher that knew just what cuts they wanted. Irene often got off the bus mid-way on her route home from work to buy particular Polish sausages and chicken from a particular grocer on Fillmore Street. They were not making an extra effort to subscribe to the prevailing hippie counterculture of the time or smitten with the new and trendy as many people are today, they instead had a distinct food made up of a truly multi-cultural, interdependent community that was accustomed to working together and creating relationships in order to thrive.

My grandparents purchased the best of what they could afford on the modest income they collectively earned, and I have to imagine that feeding a family of seven so well in the 50s and 60s required a particular brand of creativity and resourcefulness. Danny spent a lot of time in the kitchen helping Irene, who did all of the cooking for her husband and five sons. Irene passed before I came into the world, but I get the impression that creativity and resourcefulness came naturally to her given her circumstances as a young girl. It’s not clear if she immigrated to the United States with her family from Czechoslovakia (this was long before it was divided into two separate states), or if she was born very soon after they arrived in Iowa. Irene lost her mother very early in her life and spent most of her childhood in foster homes until she moved to Tacoma, Washington, where she met and married my grandfather, Harold, affectionately known as Hal. As far as I can tell, when Danny was growing up, Hal was a straight shooter who valued hard work and the good, strong tenets of his Irish-Catholic family. In all of Danny’s accounts of food sourcing and eating as a child, quality was of premiere importance, and it seems my grandparents shared that value. Instead of letting their financial means limit the quality of their repasts, they looked to their friends and community members for affordable but fantastic foods to put in the larder and on the table.

Their meals were made at home and from scratch. Irene put up dozens of jars of local fruits and vegetables purchased by the crate from a local produce stand. The family ate seasonally, entirely motivated by availability simply because “you couldn’t just get anything you wanted whenever you wanted it back then.” When someone decided they wanted apple pie in January, Irene simply visited their robust pantry shelves under the stairs to grab a quart of apples picked from their Petaluma rancher’s apple orchard. Danny would often go fishing on the windy cliffs of the bay with friends, and his mother would cook up the catch for dinner that night. I­ think that small act of making an independent contribution to their dinner table, proudly presenting his day’s work to his equally proud mother and watching her filet his catch, filled him with unparalleled joy and a sense of purpose. It was a different time to be sure, but not a more simple time, as people so often like to say. This way of sourcing, preserving, and preparing food took great effort, but perhaps it seemed effortless because it was entirely based on the human bonds that enlivened their every day. The collective goal of that community was to feed their families well, and there was a clear rhythm and logic to their foodways.

I have become part of a community much like that of my grandparents, where I source nearly all of my food locally from people I am lucky enough to call friends, and it’s anything but simple. In the sometimes-overwhelming discussion about eating local, we often hearken to a particular conversation about that ‘simpler time’ and ‘returning to the way our grandparents did things.’ The way my grandparents did things exactly fits that image but their motives were a world apart and they certainly weren’t trying to prove anything. I find that the notion of eating local also often gets misconstrued in a tense political discourse that doesn’t assign much value to community building. Community, in my view, is the way our grandparents did things. And next time I watch my dad devour a roast beef sandwich, I’ll know his love for the simple treat runs much deeper than well-cooked meat on a sourdough roll.