The guy behind the counter knows everything

by David Benjamin 

“I’ll have what she’s having.”

—Older lady customer at Katz’s deli, When Harry Met Sally

 

PARIS—As I was wedging my way between two thirsty Frenchmen and awaiting eye contact with the publican behind the bar at Le Baron Rouge, a wine and oyster oasis near the ancient Marché d’Aligre, I thought about my grandfather.

I called him Papa, but most of Tomah, Wisconsin called him Swede (although he was not remotely Swedish). Papa was a smalltown guy and a non-drinker but he had an instinct for communicating across the barricade—a bar, a deli case, a counter, a registration desk—that rears up between the tender and the tended.

I especially enjoyed Papa’s encounters with Mose, proprietor at Woodliff’s grocery. Mose presided behind a glass-and steel barrier—the dominant feature in the tiny market—inside which he daily arrayed all the fresh meat, mostly chicken (whole, or reduced to all its parts) and beef (with steak varieties from Swiss to Porterhouse), with sausages in sumptuous variety and great fat tubes of cold cuts ready to slice. Papa moseyed back to Mose with minimal needs. He usually left, after a while, with a pound of “big baloney,” some boiled ham and a half-dozen tales to carry. Papa and Mose, thirty years apart in age, were kindred shmoozers.

Many decades later, 4,000 miles away, I sussed a hint of Mose—his patience, and easy fellowship—in the bartender at Le Baron Rouge. But this guy was too busy for idle banter. To an unschooled observer, this Paris barkeep might seem to be skating on the edge of chaos. But he was in complete, imperturbable control. 

There is a flow, rhythm and priestly command to a big-city counter guy, a sense that nothing can rattle him. He knows everything and you—the customer—better know something or you’re S.O.L. 

My first experience with the guy behind the counter in the big city was a delicatessen in Chicago. I was on a day trip with friends. I recall nothing of what we did that day except for my humiliation at the deli, where I came off as a hayseed, clueless in the ways of the heartless and impatient metropolis.

I didn’t know it, but ordering a ham-on-rye in Chi—or a slice in Brooklyn, a cheesesteak in Philly or a meatball sub in Boston—resembles the battle under the boards for a rebound in Madison Square Garden. You have to box out, go up hard and risk a broken cheekbone. But that day, among the surging, jostling, elbow-intensive throng, I hesitated. I didn’t know what I wanted, what kind of bread I wanted it on, whether I wanted Swiss or Provolone, or even for-here or to-go. I didn’t know a condiment from a prophylactic.

You have to be ready with all this data when called, and you have to shout it loud enough to bruise your larynx. In a deli, everybody shouts, all the time, but never in angry. It’s the roar of pastrami.

In that crisis, I could have mimicked Papa and Mose, directing a brotherly remark to the counter guy, asking a relevant question, engaging his encyclopedic knowledge and forging the sort of 30-second kinship that somehow happens between a harried hash-slinger and a hungry customer faced by a small-print menu that reaches from the ceiling to the row of 116 Monin syrups strung along the wall. 

But I was green. 

Since then, I’ve honed my technique. But I can’t match Papa’s easy, discursive charm. Nor will I ever compare to my wife, Hotlips, a Tokyo girl who studied glass-barrier byplay next to her father at the local sushi bar. It’s axiomatic, if at all possible, that you don’t take a table at a sushi restaurant. You sit at the counter and you spot the chef who went that morning to the fish market to poke the tuna and sniff the sole. He’s the one person who can steer you away, conspiratorially, from yesterday’s hirame and toward the toro that was caught at 3 a.m. and the aji that was still twitching indignantly when he sliced its body away from its bones.

One of my simple pleasures is to stand by watching as Hotlips applies the interactive ethic of the sushi bar to a butcher shop in Paris. Impatient Parisiennes are accumulating behind her but she applies to them the Asian philosophy of amae—which basically professes that if these people ain’t family, they don’t exist. She eyeballs the butcher and impresses him somehow, implicitly, with a sense of shared purpose. Like Leonard Cohen’s seductive Suzanne, she gets him on her wavelength and touches his lumpy body with her mind. She doesn’t just specify her meat, she unveils her plan and confesses her recipe, involving him in a meal he will never see. “What should I do? Which cut is best? What’s your freshest? How many pieces?” She becomes Papa, he turns into Mose. For five minutes, she and the butcher are a couple, and there’s no one else in the boucherie. Me? I do not exist.

To illustrate Hotlips’ talent, I take you to Zabar’s, the most famous and—to non-New Yorkers—the scariest delicatessen/provisioner in darkest Manhattan. 

Hotlips has a dish in mind. She found the other ingredients elsewhere at Zabar’s. But she’s making split-pea soup and she needsa ham hock. Now, the meat department at Zabar’s is fairly civilized. You don’t have to shove aside a rabbi or outmuscle a cab-driving ex-con. You take a number, and while you wait for it to come up, you study a cornucopia of hams and lambs, poultries and porks stretching along a glass meatfront vast enough to feed Tomah for a week. Behind this Maginot, a dozen white-coated seen-it-all New Yorkers roam like hyenas on the veldt, shouting numbers, leering across the polished counter-top, demanding a decision, telling my wife, “Ham hocks? No, we don’t got no ham hocks.”

Whereat, Hotlips melts his reserve. “No hocks? Really?”

“No, we ain’t got—”

“Oh, but I’m making my thick pea soup. The recipe calls for a ham hock.”

“Oh,” says the counterman. There’s sympathy in this syllable, but also consternation. He is, after all, a New York counterman. He knows everything. 

There are two women of a certain age, bluish rinse, Upper East Side, Zabar’s regulars. This dialog has drawn them in. Rarely have they observed a Manhattan butcher stumped and hesitant.

“I could,” he says after a moment of near anguish, “give you a joint?”

“A joint?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Suddenly, he’s energized. He knows. He vanishes for a moment behind  the swinging doors. He emerges with the sawed-off rear-leg elbow of an immense smoked hog so huge it could have appeared in a Larry McMurtry novel. It weighs perhaps twenty pounds and it’s heavy-laden with ragged, unsliceable, unsaleable but delectable ham—enough for a pretty good Thanksgiving dinner. 

“Whaddya think?” the counterman asks, hopefully, angling for Hotlips’ approval. He has become putty in her little hands.

“Hm,” she says. “I guess that’ll be okay.”

We ask the price. The two ladies lean close, listening. They gaze enviously at the the globs of ham sprung the great joint of a butchered Duroc boar. 

“Oh, I don’ know,” says the counterman. He has never sold a joint before but he’s savoring the moment’s newness. “Five bucks, I guess.”

One of the ladies has to help the other, lest she sink to the floor in a swoon.

We all watch together as the Zabar’s counterman, assured once again of his omniscience and ingenuity, folds and tapes the ravaged joint into a big white package. We take our prize. We turn away. The counterman accepts the next number up from one of the ladies and asks, “What’ll it be.”

Barely a beat passes. This woman is a veteran at breaching the bar. She nods toward a departing Hotlips and—obviously aware that she’s quoting a movie—says, “I’ll have what she had.”

Unhappy ending:We got the last joint in the joint.