Speed Shrinking

New York   You’re 25 and still live with your parents?,’ she asked, aware of the ticking clock and all the other potentials she’d meet in the next two hours. ‘Just for now, until I get my organic cream cheese business running,’ he rushed to finish. ‘I-’ ‘They’re holding you back,’ she interrupted, as the buzzer went. ‘You need to overcome your ambivalence. It masks your fear of success.’

This isn’t the kind of conversation you’d normally have while speed dating — even in Jewish neurotic New York — but this is not speed dating but the next best (or arguably first best) thing: speed shrinking. Read more

Salt Beef in Soho + Channukah in Budapest

Salt Beef in Soho



On a London street nowhere near the Jewish heartland, next to a restaurant specialising in pork and opposite a musical about a green monster, a ‘kind of Jewish deli with cocktails’, has bloomed. In a sense, E. Mishkin has been here a while: the distressed planks coating the walls were once floorboards, and the net curtains and squeezy ketchup bottles are as retro as the ‘On Air’ sign above the booth at the back. In another sense, though, he was never here at all. Ask about Mr Mishkin and you’ll get the story of Ezra, a Ukrainian Jew who fled the 1919 pogrom and opened a café in London where his fellow immigrants could get a taste of home. The pogrom is fact, but Ezra Mishkin, like this joint, is the creation of Russell Norman, owner of those famously Jewish restaurants Polpo, Spuntino, Da Polpo and Polpetto.

Norman wanted a name like the old East London cafés but his own isn’t up to the job: if he had been lurking in the Ukraine when the Cossacks galloped in, they would have swerved past him. So, why does a non-Jew known for hip Italian food open a Jewish deli serving Polish pork hotdogs? Is London en route to New York- style culinary integration? A deli has just opened in Marylebone; there’s even a Jewish pop-up restaurant. But both of those are kosher, in every sense. Mishkins is something else. Read more

Dispatches

The Big Cheese

The wild, top-hat-and-jeans-clad compére jumped onto the stage to announce the 20 semi-finalists of the second annual New York Cheesemonger Invitational. The crowd roared approval at those über-mongers who could detect age, nationality, name and bloom. For this, the third of four rounds, each contestant was to cut two 1/4 pound chunks of cheese and wrap each in cheese paper in under a minute. To mad applause, the first woman cheesemonger took to the stage. The clock began to tick. She estimated and sliced cheese amounts, posed triumphantly for the audience when her scale read 0.27lbs and began to wrap vigorously.

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