Thanks to Mike C.
The Jewish Deli: An American Tale Told in Pickles and Pastrami
“I’ll Have What She’s Having,” a traveling exhibit on the Jewish delicatessen, looks back at a vibrant institution fueled by immigration and irresistible food.
In a display of history and nostalgia, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles is memorializing a fading cuisine: the Jewish delicatessen.Credit…Joel Barhamand for The New York Times
- Published July 18, 2022Updated July 19, 2022, 4:57 p.m. ET
LOS ANGELES — The colors are fading, but the photograph of the Carnegie Deli from 2008 still calls up a world of heaping pastrami sandwiches, pungent smells of brine and smoke, and tourists lined out the door onto Seventh Avenue in New York.
A few steps away, a kosher carving knife, a pushcart, a pickle barrel and a battered traveling valise used by immigrants from Lithuania are lined up against a wall. They conjure the Lower East Side of a century ago, bustling with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, in the midst of creating a cuisine and a new kind of restaurant.
This attic’s worth of artifacts sprawls through “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli,” an exhibit chronicling the rise of that restaurant culture in America. It is by all indications the most sweeping survey of this culinary institution attempted by a major museum. (Why that name? Do you have to ask?)
The museum, though, is far from the tenements of Lower Manhattan: The Skirball Cultural Center, about 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, created the show and over the next year will send it to three other venues around the country, including the New-York Historical Society.
