The pastrami probably hits you first. One whiff, you`re gone. But then, too, there`s the cacophony on both sides of the cafeteria line. The hungry, identified by barren tray and growling gut, keep up the front-of-the-glass refrain: ”matzo,” ”kreplach,” ”make mine with noodles.”
The soup man answers back with the appropriate plop in your bowl. Down by the slicing machines that never cease, the corned beef man is making his usual racket. Don`t dare ask for white bread and mayo with your corned chunk of cow. He`ll razz you till your face matches the bright pink beast he`s lancing and lobbing onto your Jewish rye.
It`s hard to say just what gives the joint away. But you`re barely through the door and there`s no mistaking where you`ve landed: Manny`s Coffee Shop, on South Jefferson Street, couple of doors north of Roosevelt Road, down in the urban cranny where you go when you want things on the cheap: shoes, suits, scrap metal, red roses for the lady.
If you can get in the door, that is. Big If.
Once you wiggle through the knot of humanity that`s sure to be clogged in Manny`s vestibule six days a week, half-past 11 till half-past 1-when half of Chicago, it seems, gets a heavy hankering for corned beef, potato pancakes, kishkes, and matzo balls big enough to keep you from drowning should one float by if you`re ever flailing in a pool-all you have to do is open wide your nostrils, your eyelids, your ears and, of course, your mouth.
What comes at you is a slice of this city at its juicy best.
It has been that way for half a century, ever since Charlie and Jack Raskin, an Army cook and his business-minded brother, rolled out their first matzo balls and baked shortribs at the height of World War II.
They`d sunk their savings into a storefront at Halsted and Van Buren, and made it a cafeteria in an age when steam tables rife with choices were all the rage. Now, one name change, two generations, four locations and 50 years later, it`s one of the last of a dying breed.
Grab a tray, butt in line wherever you choose, and sink your teeth into Manny`s.
”We knew you were comin`. We hired security,” says Gino Gambarota, the mustachioed corned beef, brisket and pastrami cutter, to a burly, bearded guy in a trench coat shuffling down the line, tray in one hand, walkie-talkie in the other. ”No pickle! You on a diet?”
Gambarota spins onto the glass shelf a pastrami on rye that leaves you dizzy, so abundantly does it ooze with the spice and fat that make it worth the dent on your mortality. With deli moves that can only be described as art in motion, Gambarota knocks out 860 bread-and-meat creations a day: 700 corned beef, 100 pastrami, 30 each of brisket and-the newest rage at Manny`s-turkey pastrami, for those intent on drawing out their life lines.
Farther down the line, past the shelf that lures you in with bread pudding too ample for its bowl, chocolate cupcakes threatening to crumble under an Astrodome of fudge frosting, and, for those yearning to be lean, bulbous strawberries wedged by the dozen into a wee little dish, you overhear this:
”He`s on a diet. Normally he spends $16, today he spent $8.” This from an overportioned bloke who would do well to pare down the portions on his own plate, leaning over his tray to schmooze with red-headed Ruby Medel, the fast- fingered fixture behind the register, who has been ringing up checks somewhere on the order of 32 years.
Tray and check in hand, you look around the two vast chambers of white and gold-flecked Formica tables (no booths, this is a get-in-get-out kind of filling station), and you get a notion why they call this place an institution like no other in Chicago.
There`s Dr. Robert Stein, the county coroner, settling into a sardine sandwich. (”Actually watching him cut up the sardines is the interesting part,” says a regular, who has witnessed the lunch-table dissection more times than he cares to remember.)
Bilandics in the back
In the back room is former Mayor Mike Bilandic and his wife, Heather. He`s diving into his usual spartan fare, a vegetable plate.
She has a salad and iced tea. ”They`re not big eaters,” informs Ruby, who you`d swear knows the culinary particulars of every one of the 1,000 stomachs that pass by her register each day. Who likes his bagels scooped out, who likes his skim milk on the side, who likes crackers with his spaghetti-she`s got the goods on `em all.
Fred Foreman, the big guy who runs the U.S. attorney`s office downtown, is over by the wall, wolfing down his usual: corned beef, potato pancake, two kosher dills.
Scattered across Manny`s vast Formica landscape you find the usual roundup of suspects: an alderman ”with his chick of the week,” an appellate judge, a state representative, a table of lieutenants from the fire academy down the block, shoe peddlers from Chernin`s across the street, a couple of soybean traders, the owner of a kosher salami factory in town and, over by the fire exit, a biggie in the rubber-hose business joined at his table by one of the biggest shoe-parts men in the city.
”It`s a cops-and-robbers joint,” says Gerald Hirsch, vice chairman of the oldest trading company on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and a man who wears suspenders emblazoned with hundreds of little white dollar signs as he slurps spoonfuls of herring in sour cream.
”On any given day you`ll see old man Stein from the coroner`s office, a bunch from 11th and State (police headquarters), and from time to time you`ll see various mob underbosses sitting next to the cops from 11th and State.”
`Great place to campaign`
”It`s a great place to campaign,” says political guru and former newspaper reporter David Axelrod, who has probably inhaled enough julienne salads, rice pudding and chicken-rice soup over the last 15 years to have earned a signature dish on the menu.
Only this isn`t the kind of shop that`s going to single out one soul over another. Go uptown and plant yourself by some leafy fern if that`s what you`re after, say the folks who frequent Manny`s.
”It`s like the perfect cross-section of the city: black people, white people, rich people, poor people, and people in between. That`s one of the charms of the place,” says Axelrod, who made this Richie Daley`s first stop after announcing his bid for the mayor`s office in 1989.
Oh yeah, wasn`t that the time Daley asked for his corned beef the South Side Irish way, on white, with mayo?
”That is a filthy lie being spread by political opponents!” barked Axelrod, assuring us that the mayor is a man who knows his way through a Jewish deli counter.
Like every joint that has earned the right to be called a local institution, Manny`s has its own tableau of rituals and unwritten rules.
For starters, don`t bother politely standing in line. They expect you to bump and grind your way up to the glass. Once there, go ahead and yell at the soup-and-sandwich crew. They won`t yell back, except for Gino at the corned beef mounds. He makes it his business to serve a heaping side of sass with whatever he stuffs between your bread.
When you get to Ruby and the register at the end of the line, don`t reach for your wallet. They`ll know as far away as the ladies` room that you`re a rookie, because you don`t pay till you`re at the candy counter on your way out the door.
Don`t wait for a table to clear. Grab an open seat wherever you can find one; this isn`t any place for people picky about whose fork they`re staring into. And be sure to take your dishes off your tray as soon as you get to the table. Only the uninitiated keep their food on their trays.
Manny`s Philharmonic
As every institution must have its unwritten rites and rules, so, too, must the folks who work there be as colorful as the patrons, if not more so.
You`ve met Gino and Ruby. Meet Marshall Bailey, a grandfather of seven, who works the steam tables nearest the door and makes it his job to ”explain to the uninitiated what the heck that food is, what a kishke is, a knish, kreplach and kashe varnishkes-in Yiddish, they call them the K foods.”
Then there`s Helen, up at the front register. You go by one of two names when you hand over your check to Helen: You`re Honey, or Sweetie.
”They`re like a symphony orchestra,” Axelrod says of the cafeteria crew. ”Everybody has their role, and they play it to perfection. From the guys who take your trays before your butt hits your chair, to the gal who sits behind the register who`s the single fastest register person in America, to Gino, to my friend at the front counter who always makes sure there`s cherry sucking candies on top so I can grab `em on my way out.”
The conductor, then, is Ken Raskin, 37, grandson of Jack, son of Manny, who took over the crew and-in a pinch-all the cooking 10 years ago when his father died at age 53, two days after surgery for lung cancer.
He`d been at work the Friday before, arms crossed, as usual, standing at the takeout counter, presiding over the 11 o`clock rush he so loved. ”Eleven o`clock, that was his adrenaline,” says Manny`s widow, Arlene Mann, who has since remarried. Her new husband has been a lunchtime regular for decades.
Ken, Arlene and Manny`s only son, walks in the door with 15 dozen hot bagels and bialies between 3:30 and 4 each morning, Monday through Saturday. As was the case with his father and his grandfather before him, there is no job at Manny`s he doesn`t do. Salt the sidewalks. Slice the mushrooms. Wipe the tables. Kibitz with the customers.
”This is my home. I feel very comfortable and safe here,” says Raskin, who grew up in the various incarnations of Manny`s as it moved about the city. His first living memory, he says, is not being allowed to climb the back stairs when Manny`s was on Roosevelt Road, three locations ago.
”It was too cold up there,” explains his mother after all these years.
”I thought it was a bookie joint,” says Raskin, dumbfounded by the simple revelation.
Mother and son, sitting at a side table in the lull between breakfast and lunch, explain just how Jack Raskin came to call his restaurant Manny`s, shortly after buying the place on Roosevelt Road.
”There was a sign over the restaurant,” says Arlene. ”It was called Sunny`s Cafeteria. Being the practical man that he was, and trying to spend the least amount of money possible, he realized if he named it Jack`s he`d have to change the neon sign on both sides. Luckily, he had a son named Manny, short for Emanuel. So they took off the S-U and put up M-A, and it was Manny`s Cafeteria.”
And the rest, well, you know …
