Shaken and Stirred by William L. Hamilton

Author:William L. Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061873393
Publisher: HarperCollins

Yield: 1 serving

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DR. BROWN

Wolf’s Royal Cream Soda & The Harrison Tonic

ONE OF NEW YORK’S NEWEST COCKTAIL LOUNGES is not exactly where you would expect it to be: Chelsea or Williamsburg or the Lower East Side. It’s in Wolf’s Delicatessen on 57th Street, near the Avenue of the Americas, upstairs above the sandwich counter and the dessert case.

Wolf’s unveiled a new menu last week (the items from the old dog-eared brown one reprinted on coffee-shop gloss stock), but now alongside the smoked fish platters and latkes is a cocktail list that includes house specialties like Wolf’s Royal Cream Soda. That’s Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda, a deli staple, with Absolut vodka in it.

The lounge, which also serves breakfast (the bar’s bottle shelves rotate to conceal the liquor), is the latest update to Wolf’s, which is owned by Ralph Scotto, who trademarked the name in 1998 and moved the deli to its present location. The original Wolf’s, at the corner, was started in 1951 by Dave Wolf, a concentration camp survivor, as one of a small chain of delis in Manhattan.

“People keep saying, ‘Well, you’re Italian, how do you do Jewish?’” Mr. Scotto, an Italian American from Brooklyn, said on Wednesday. Mr. Scotto was wearing a Big Ralph’s Brake Shop baseball cap and a Ducati shirt.

“I come from a cooking family,” he explained. “It’s a cuisine. This is what I do. I don’t do pizza.”

Mr. Scotto, fifty-five, has been in the deli business since he was eleven.

“My father broke his neck diving into a swimming pool,” he recalled. “I took a bus to 86th Street, and there was a delicatessen called Hy Tulip. I walked up to the door. Marty Sachs, the owner, was throwing his dishwasher out. He gave me an apron, and I worked in the kitchen next to the guys making knishes.”

Over the years, in various delis, Mr. Scotto explained, he learned how to cook corned beef and pastrami. He can also “pump” tongue—a method of curing beef tongue by putting a needle into the artery and injecting it with brine until it swells.

The intention at Wolf’s is to make it an “upscale deli,” as Mr. Scotto put it, an idea that might strike Wolf’s regulars as making as much sense as a downscale Hotel Plaza. You still get a bowl of pickles and a bowl of coleslaw on the table with every meal. You still get tiny red-haired women, folded over like wallets, eating dinner at four in the afternoon. This is a cosmopolitan crowd, as in emigre, not as in Sarah Jessica Parker.

But cocktails are part of the plan. Wolf’s Royal Cream Soda is good, if you like cream soda (I do). For the record, it’s kosher, too. The production of Absolut is supervised by Rabbi Moshe Edelmann in Sweden. Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda, which originated in 1869 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bears the KOF-K certificate of rabbinical supervision. Dr. Brown’s drinks, including cherry soda and Cel-Ray Soda, a seltzer produced with celery seed, were most popular in Jewish delis before Coca-Cola became kosher, early in the 1930s.

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