Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

Chris and Calvin Marty, the owners behind Best Intentions, say they dont make a big deal that theyre Jewish. The brothers, who opened their Logan Square bar in 2015, grew up in Cambridge, Wisconsin, a village about 60 miles west of Milwaukee and with a population of about 1,600. Less than 1 percent of Wisconsins population is Jewish, per a 2020 study from Brandeis University.

We probably experience a little private guilt that maybe were not the best Jews we never went to temple, we never had bar mitzvahs, says Chris Marty.

The bars menu definitely contains some decidedly unkosher items like the Cuppa Shrimp with mild sauce, a gnarly cheeseburger, and red wine-braised short rib. The harissa chicken provides another nod to the Middle East. But tucked within the menu lies a surprise matzo ball soup and a great version at that, with a rich broth darkened by duck fat yet brightened by heavenly wafts of ginger and lemongrass.

Yes a place like this uses duck fat for its matzo ball soup.

In Chicago, its not especially hard to find a bowl of matzo ball soup, as a basic version appears on the menu of every self-respecting Jewish deli in town. But in recent years, the dish has begun to spring up in some unexpected places, too, including while perched on a bar stool on a rainy Friday in Logan Square and double-fisting a dirty martini. Best Intentions manages to channel the best of Wisconsin dives and serve fun, well-executed bar food. It was immediately clear that whoever created Best Intentions had spent some time in Wisconsins many unironic watering holes like Rivers End in rural Ontario.

In Jewish American food, the two big things are matzo ball soup and bagels whats more ubiquitous than the two of those? posits Zach Engel, chef and owner of Michelin-starred Israeli and Middle Eastern restaurant Galit in Lincoln Park. Even his mother, an unenthusiastic home cook, makes a pretty killer version for family holiday meals: As far as representations of Jewish culture, [matzo ball soup] makes us look pretty good.

Matzo ball soup was once on the menu at Galit, but Engel hasnt served it since the pandemic began as the restaurant has shifted to a four-course menu of shared dishes; soup is difficult to share. Nevertheless, Engel says hes watched with interest as more restaurants work to attract diners with unexpected food while simultaneously tapping into a feeling of cozy familiarity. Matzo ball soup is a super straightforward way to get people to feel a level of comfort in their heart, but its still interesting, he says.

Though their exact origin is hazy, the proliferation of matzo balls a simple mixture of matzo meal, beaten eggs, water, and schmaltz, or chicken fat is generally attributed to German, Austrian, and Alsatian Jews who adapted regional Eastern European soup dumplings to suit Jewish dietary laws. No matter its history, the matzo balls simplicity also means that even unenthusiastic home cooks can deliver a version that will please a crowd.

The mixture is formed into balls (as usual, theres debate over the supremacy of fluffy floaters or toothsome sinkers) and simmered in boiling water or even better, soup stock, until they swell into spongy spheres. Given the relatively small number of American Jews about 7.6 million, or 2.4 percent of the total U.S. population, and a mere 319,600 in the Chicago area, according to the same Brandeis study Ashkenazi-style Jewish deli cuisine has made an outsized impact on mainstream American culture in general, from corned beef on St. Patricks Day to Meg Ryans infamous faux-gasm in rom-com icon When Harry Met Sally.

As a child, Chris Marty was close to his great-grandmother, Hannah Westler, who fled antisemitism in Europe around the turn of the century and immigrated to Milwaukee, where she worked 14,000 jobs to put her sons through law school. The brothers grew up eating her matzo ball soup, which she made from a recipe featuring a special twist: vodka. Years later, her boozy invention would inspire them to create a matzo ball cocktail for a local bartending challenge, an exercise that rekindled their connection to their familys past.

Though hed heard of it before, Best Intentions chef Bryan McClaran, whos worked at the Cambodian restaurant Hermosa and the Asian-influenced Bixi Beer, hadnt actually tried matzo ball soup when his bosses pitched the idea. Research involved YouTube videos, cookbooks, and some New York Times articles from the 80s, and in the end, the first version he wound up tasting was his own. Together, the brothers and McClaran worked to hone a recipe that would be worthy of the history it represented.

The big thing for us, other than nailing the consistency of the matzo ball, was not to goy it up with dill, Chris Marty chuckles. Anywhere we go with my mom, if theres matzo ball soup, well order it. Shes always like, Why do the goys have to load it up with so much fucking dill?

Its a Saturday in March at nearly 18-year-old deli Eleven City Diner, and owner Brad Rubin is holding court from a roomy booth inside his South Loop deli-diner hybrid. Founded in 2006 as an ode to casual midcentury hospitality, the restaurant, which at one point had a Lincoln Park location, has endured long enough to become a pillar of Chicagos Jewish culinary scene while attracting non-Jews with a retro aesthetic and plentiful plates of food.

Rubin bursts with pride as he recounts his familys Ashkenazi immigrant history and explains the meaning behind each photograph, vinyl record, and painting on its walls. His clear, resonant voice rings out as he bids farewell to customers (he learns all of their names) and jokes with employees.

Its also impossible to ignore that at least a cup, if not a bowl, of matzo ball soup can be found on half the tables. The broth is light but not additive-yellow, with fluffy-yet-firm matzo balls noteworthy for both their ample size and distinctive green flecks of parsley, mostly for color. However one feels about parsley, the diners version serves well as a baseline matzo ball soup uncomplicated, nostalgic, and reminiscent of a bubbes concoction with slightly more polish. There are no surprises in Eleven Citys bowl, and in this way, its a stark contrast to McClarans melange of elegant aromatics and ducky character at Best Intentions.

Rubins resonant tone, however, drops to a hush as he admits Eleven City hasnt had kreplach since COVID began. The diners who used to order it have since moved out to the suburbs, he says. Kreplach are small and plump dumplings stuffed with fillings like meat and mashed potatoes cousins to Polish pierogi, Russian pelmeni, Italian stuffed pasta, and Chinese jiaozi. The difference between matzo balls and kreplach is mostly negligible, but, according to Rubins numbers, the gap in sales was significant. Matzo balls arent going anywhere, Rubin affirms.

Indeed, in recent years theyve also cropped up on the menu at seemingly random spots like Armitage Ale House, Lincoln Parks British pub from Au Cheval owner Hogsalt Hospitality. In West Town, chef Zoe Schor also served a pepper-laden matzo ball soup at Split-Rail, which she closed in late 2023. Schor isnt shy about her Jewish American identity but the restaurant, a neighborhood hit known for fried chicken, was never positioned as a particularly Jewish spot. But for Schor, the soup was about something bigger than Split-Rail its presence marked a broader movement among chefs seeking to connect with their own background.

I feel like in terms of the zeitgeist of becoming classically trained and cooking the food you grew up eating, Ashkenazi Jewish culinary traditions were a little later to hit the trends, she says. Shes been happy to see the ripple effects manifest in spots like Russ & Daughters, the 110-year-old New York appetizing store that launched a wildly successful cafe in 2014. I think its very cool and important that we continue these traditions and the conversation.

The early 2010s saw a matzo ball revolution of sorts, arguably ushered in by the 2013 debut of Shalom Japan, a Brooklyn restaurant where chefs Aaron Israel and Sawako Okochi have made a major splash with their matzo ball ramen. In Chicago, some had the audacity to suggest adding jalapeno, and in 2020, the short-lived restaurant Rye in West Loop made matzo balls with blue corn masa. The dish has come a long way in, at least in the canon of Jewish culinary history, a very short time. But by its very nature, matzo ball soup is relevant not due to its ingredients, but rather, the sensory and emotional experiences it evokes.

Its difficult to pin down why exactly matzo ball soup has risen to such a cross-cultural level of notoriety. But a look back at the soups lore in the U.S. may shed some light. Take Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller please. Its hard to imagine a worse pairing than the legendary Hollywood sex symbol and the Jewish Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who devoted much of his career to shedding light on the American everyman.

As the story goes, the couple frequently dined at the home of Millers mother, Isadore, who served a lot of matzo ball soup. They ate it so much that at one point, Monroe reportedly quipped, Isnt there any other part of the matzo you can eat?

With that, a star was born and the humble, homely matzo ball was catapulted into American pop-culture history.

In the wake of the Holocaust, the mid-1950s (the couple married in 1956) was an unusually optimistic era for American Jews, who began to enter the middle class and seek higher education. For the first time, the American public was exposed to stories like Oscar-winning 1947 film Gentlemans Agreement, which starred cinematic icon Gregory Peck as a non-Jewish reporter who poses as a Jew to research an expos on antisemitism.

Despite ongoing institutionalized discrimination at universities and social hubs like country clubs, American Jews at the time saw broader social acceptance than perhaps in any other millennia of Jewish history. And suddenly, that cultural validation reached new heights. Monroe, the blonde bombshell herself, was eating matzo balls too, lending mainstream credibility to a tradition thats endured in Chicago and across the country well beyond Miller and Monroes marriage, which lasted less than five years.

Though reluctant to get too high-minded about what it means to serve Jewish food in a non-Jewish context, for Chris Marty, it points to a desire to push back on a national political shift toward exclusion. I think society is pretty shitty right now, he says. People are highly intolerant and very insular The beauty of the bar and restaurant industry especially in Chicago is that you have that willingness to just love it if its good.

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