When I was growing up on Long Island in the 1970s, school field trips meant being schlepped on a bus to the McGraw-Hill building on Sixth Avenue, to a multimedia film called the “New York Experience,” in which a kaleidoscopic montage of New Yorkers of different stripes celebrated both past and present life in Gotham. Nowadays, all one needs to do to get a sense of the real New York is to pay a visit to Katz’s Deli on Houston Street, where a prickly, pickle-y, briny Yiddish gestalt holds imperious sway in a churning sea of multi-racial, multi-ethnic customers and counter people.

My maternal grandparents, Jean and Lou Kaplan, did not keep kosher. That was their ancestors’ way, the path of slavish adherence to the stringencies of Jewish law. But old habits die hard, and they never ate the foods they had not consumed as children. They would sooner have taken off all their clothes and danced naked in front of their neighbors in Flushing, Queens, than down ham, clams, or even a cheeseburger.

When I give talks on the history of the Jewish deli, I’m inevitably asked what my favorite deli is. I often sidestep the question for a number of reasons: 1) I’m an historian, so the delis that matter the most to me are the legendary ones from the past, the ones I’ve only heard stories about, like Grabstein’s and the Hy Tulip in Brooklyn, Reuben’s and Lindy’s in Manhattan, and Schweller’s in the Bronx. 2) I interviewed a lot of deli owners for my book, and for those who are still around, I wouldn’t want to play favorites and offend them if I don’t say they’re the best; and 3) I’ve tried to keep kosher for my entire adult life after college--although I’m a bit more flexible these days--so my experience of eating in non-kosher delis is much more limited than of eating in kosher ones.

I did grow up going to a few delis that I’m nostalgic about…