While the kosher deli is a staple of American Jewish nostalgia, its more modest cousin, the dairy restaurant, has largely been forgotten. The Brooklyn-born cartoonist Ben Katchor attempts to correct this state of affairs in his recent illustrated history of the institution. Jenna Weissman Joselit writes in her review:
The text that accompanies [Katchor’s] images is [highly] idiosyncratic; not so much composed as accumulated, it’s history à la carte. Where conventional historical accounts place a premium on context and a sustained narrative, not to mention a table of contents and formal chapters, this sprawling volume purposefully eschews all that. Instead, it throws everything it has at the reader: the intricacies of the Jewish dietary laws; the history of the restaurant, which first took off in Paris in the wake of the French Revolution; the relationship between temperance and its banishing of beer to vegetarianism and its embrace of milk; the emergence of the “milkhedike personality,” who preferred contemplation to action.
[But] I’d even go so far as to say that food doesn’t really fire [Katchor’s] imagination. . . . Recovering [the dairy restaurant’] mild-mannered patterns of sociability, its chatter and conviviality, drives him forward. That much of it was informed by “Yiddishkayt,” the constellation of behaviors, gestures, and sensibilities carried from the Old World into the New by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, raises the stakes, prompting this keen-eyed observer of urban life to linger a while longer.
He mourns the passing of a way of life—“these intimations of a better time”—that once encompassed the simpler pleasures of the palate along with a place to hang one’s battered hat. Contemporary readers of The Dairy Restaurant may no longer be familiar with baskets of onion rolls set atop a stainless-steel counter, or, for that matter, with protose steak [a precursor to today’s veggie burger], but, in their current hungering for the kind of community this humble eatery once provided, they’re apt to recognize themselves.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/8041/the-milchik-way/