Sunday, February 23, 2025, 1:39AM |  34°
MENU
Advertisement
cover of
2
MORE

A very kosher read from Ben Katchor

A very kosher read from Ben Katchor

An award-winning cartoonist composes a love letter to the Yiddish ‘dairy restaurants’ of NYC.

“THE DAIRY RESTAURANT”

By Ben Katchor

Nextbook/Schocken ($29.95)

Advertisement

Ben Katchor was the first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000 for his humorous take on Jewish culture. But readers expecting a graphic novel such as “The Beauty Supply District “ or “Hand-Drying in America: And Other Stories” are in for a surprise. Although profusely illustrated with ink-washed line drawings, “The Dairy Restaurant” is a “real” — that is to say, typeset — book, exhaustively researched and authoritatively well-written, not a comic strip.

Nonetheless, the integration of word and picture are at issue in “The Dairy Restaurant,” not only owing to the author’s drawing-board background, upon which he generated both words (on an uphill slant) and pictures by hand, but because this story must be illustrated since it can’t be tasted. The author is also designer and de facto typesetter making every correction (it is already going into a second, slightly revised printing). Throughout, therefore, image and text are brought together in a variety of intentional, very meaningful ways.

The opening section employs a children’s storybook approach. Wash drawings splash across double-page spreads as accompanying text dilates on the Sumerian origins of the Garden of Eden as archetypal restaurant. Each picture is worth at least a few hundred words, and several firsts are enumerated: Adam and Eve as the first customers (who meet on a blind date); an “upright creature” (a wily serpent in the Bible) as the first surly waiter; and Yahweh as the first apologetic proprietor fresh out of appetizers (the Forbidden Fruit). The diners, shamed into dressing for dinner, are also the first tip-stiffers.

A history of Jewish dietary law and the subsequent origin of the restaurant as a European enterprise follows. Here, words and images break out into open conflict: The text wraps around every contour of the exuberant drawings like they formed a graphic obstacle course. The reading experience verges on a struggle only because the narrative becomes so compelling; the reader is more engrossed in the ancient taboo separating milk from meat in cooking and eating and the evolution of Kosher hygiene resulting in a unique cultural cuisine. Here, one is advised to circle back and engage the art separately.

Advertisement

Tevye, made famous in Broadway’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” is analyzed as the archetypal literary “milekhdike personality”: the hapless, impoverished dairyman forever daydreaming of marrying off his daughters to rich families while delivering fresh milk to peasants in the Russian Pale. The dishes derived from his product—potato knishes, milkhiker borscht, cheese kreplekh, varnishkes, blintzes, and more — not only feed a modern, anti-urban hunger for pastoral romance, but form the basic menu of the modern, sanitary, spotless dairy restaurant that emerges in distant “Jewish city-states” like New York. Eternally stymied in his pursuit of wealth like a dairy version of Ralph Kramden, Tevye modestly consoles himself in the knowledge of his pure, semi-sacred social function.

In the latter two-thirds of the book, the drawings are tamed within a rectangular grid. This more conventional format recounts the Jewish vegetarian and dairy restaurant industry, both kosher and not, as it once flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Every address from the Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Israel that can be ascertained or even inferred from a “Jewish-sounding” phonebook listing is recorded. One hankers for pandemic takeout until one realizes: Most of these eateries don’t exist anymore.

Drawings surrender finally to reproduced menus, matchbook covers, postcards, and newspaper advertisements in Yiddish. In a few instances a single, paper-wrapped sugar cube is the only evidence the author can find. Such sparse documentation is all that remains of a once-thriving industry and uncelebrated food movement that was never conscious of itself as such.

The final section is a memoir of the author’s own meanderings through the twilight of the dairy restaurant. Many still echo with the voices of Zero Mostel, Walter Matthau, Leo Tolstoy and other regulars, both Jew and gentile; most are on their last legs and close within weeks of discovery. Through these recollections an agenda becomes clear: to recreate the landscape of the dairy restaurant as it once existed, everywhere at every moment in time, all at once.

Reproducing this once-real landscape is nonetheless an act of the imagination as breathtaking as the author’s earlier graphic novels. “The Beauty Supply District” was a make-believe place where wholesalers dispensed cosmetics along with aesthetic philosophy, lovingly chronicled by intrepid Julius Knipl, real estate photographer (voiced by the late Jerry Stiller on NPR). In “The Dairy Restaurant,” the chronicler is the author himself, who has compiled a testament worthy of its savory history.

Don Simpson writes and draws the adventures of Ms. Megaton Man at msmegatonman.blogspot.com.

First Published: May 22, 2020, 3:52 p.m.

RELATED
SHOW COMMENTS (0)  
Join the Conversation
Commenting policy | How to Report Abuse
If you would like your comment to be considered for a published letter to the editor, please send it to letters@post-gazette.com. Letters must be under 250 words and may be edited for length and clarity.
Partners
Advertisement
York County District Attorney Timothy J. Barker reacts during a news conference regarding the shooting at UPMC Memorial Hospital in York, Pa. on Saturday, Feb. 22, 2025.
1
news
Police officer killed, gunman dead in shooting at UPMC Memorial Hospital in York
The University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning
2
business
Amid funding uncertainty, Pitt pauses doctoral admissions
Elon Musk told federal workers Saturday that they must respond to an email by summarizing their accomplishments for the week, repeating a tactic he used to cull the workforce at his social media company.
3
news
Elon Musk gives all federal workers 48 hours to explain what they did last week
Pirates outfielder DJ Stewart gets congratulations from teammates after his home run against the Baltimore Orioles in the first game of the Grapefruit League season at Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota, Fla., on Saturday, Feb. 22, 2025.
4
sports
5 takeaways from Pirates' spring training victory over Orioles
Mike Lange’s family, coworkers, and friends stand on the ice during a memorial celebration of Lange’s career and life at the PPG Paints Arena before the Penguins take on the Washington Capitols on Saturday, Feb. 22, 2025. Mike passed away on the 19th and was a beloved play-by-play announcer for the Pittsburgh Penguins for 46 years.
5
sports
Jason Mackey: Penguins hit all the right notes in honoring icon Mike Lange
cover of "The Dairy Restaurant" by Ben Katchor
Ben Katchor, auhtor of "The Dairy Restaurant"  (Jeff Goodman)
Advertisement
LATEST ae
Advertisement
TOP
Email a Story