Have you ever woken up from a dream to a voice in your head?
I woke up last Saturday morning at 5:30 am with a mysterious thought still echoing in my noggin, “Young people show us what the world can be if you add magic.”
I don’t know where it came from, but there it was. Oddly coherent. And since it was kind of an intriguing thought, I decided to ponder it all morning.
To me, it comes back to the power (yes, power) of naivete. The gift of not knowing all of the things that can go wrong in a particular situation, and being so excited and impetuous that you don’t really care. And that’s good because knowledge – knowing all the things that might go wrong – can hold you back. Skepticism, and the worry that results, is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Hold on a second,” I hear you saying. “Knowledge is illuminating, knowledge is power. Without it, what do we really have?” True. But it’s also true that we humans can tend to over-interpret and over-generalize our “knowledge” such that it shrouds and distorts reality. Because reality is more complex and dynamic than we give it credit for and we tend to be intellectually lazy.
The young, who some say “know nothing,” very often prove this point by trying something we thought to be very close to impossible and then succeeding. It’s hard to wrap our heads around this, but think of it this way: there’s the universe of all things knowable and unknowable (giant circle), then there’s the universe of all knowable things (big circle), then there’s what we think we know (small circle), then there’s what we actually do, in fact, know (dot).
Because of the difference between what we think we know and what we actually do know, we’re very often better off not knowing anything at all. When courageous and somewhat naive young people prove to us the existence of this gap in our understanding, we might initially call that magic or a fluke or a lucky break. But really, it’s just because we’ve over-generalized and over-interpreted our lessons (again, because that is human nature).
“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.” — J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
North Berkeley’s new Delirama has a bit of magic
Experience might tell you not to open a Jewish-style delicatessen five minutes away from the only other Jewish delicatessen in the East Bay (Sauls). Experience might tell you that Pastrami on pizza, tacos and salads would be too weird for people. Experience might tell you not to open a Jewish joint if you’re not Jewish. But it would apparently be wrong.
Before it started at its Solano Ave location in North Berkeley (1746 Solano @ Ensenada) in August of this year, Delirama was a pop-up named Pyro’s Pastrami in Oakland’s Jack London Square started by a young pastrama-preneur named Cash Caris (who is not Jewish) and his partner Ana Cann (also not Jewish). Cash started his restaurant career at a kosher joint in Santa Clara where he developed a passion for the art of seasoning, brining, steaming and smoking of beef. Later in his career, presumably at a moment he’d looked to make a change, he asked himself two questions:
“What food can I not live without?
“What can I make really well?”
For Cash, the answer to both questions was a metaphorical neon sign that read “PASTRAMI.”
Some say the most sensual of all cured meats, Pastrami is fundamentally a Jewish food, the origins of which I cover in my review of SF’s Deli Board. To make Delirama’s pastrami, the small-batch, barrel-aged beef is given a 26-day bath in a brine of water and spices. For reference, this is an exceptionally long time for pastrami. Most recipes call for a 2-day to 8-day brine. New York’s famous Katz Deli brines for around 14-21 days, and that’s considered a good long brine.
When you light the beacon of pastrami, Jewish folks come a-running. And if you do pastrami well, as Delirama unequivocably does, it invites lots of customer questions and opinions about other Jewish foods you could/should/might-consider-hint-hint making. That’s how Deliramas menu grew to include latkes, matzo ball soup, bagels, bialys, and so on.
But the pastrami is definitely the main course at Delirama and they apply it both liberally and creatively. So, yes, there are pastrami tacos, pastrami pizza, pastrami bialys, pastrami cream cheese and pastrami chopped salad. They have pastrami bacon, pastrami spiced chips, and something tells me they’re not done coming up with ideas.
The pair always intended for Delirama to be 50% vegetarian, so the customer obsession with the beef was a little disconcerting. So they introduced a house-made vegan version of the pastrami that’s (yer not gonna believe this) basically celery root. People who go for that sort of thing (not I) claim that it’s just as good as the real thing. I haven’t tried it, but that sounds a lot like self-delusional thinking to me (and I’ve been burned by that WAY too many times by that.) But you’re right, I shouldn’t judge.
Trippy decor
The space feels like an insurance office circa 1975 had a tipple of psilocybin tea: old wood paneling halfway up the walls with bright pink the rest of the way. Old brown carpet, white foam ceiling panels, and fluorescent lighting mix with cartoonish mushrooms painted on the front windows and a bright orange wall in front of the coffee counter with a giant green pickle-guy hanging above it. The tables and chairs scream “downscale nursing home cafeteria” and there’s a poster (originally a New York Magazine cover) on the wall that says, “1973 Pastrami Sandwich Olympics.” (It pictures and rates 18 pastrami sandwiches from New York City Jewish delicatessens from 1973 - Katz’s came in dead last, by the way). The price for a pastrami sandwich back in 1973? $1.00 to $2.45. A big, neon-lit speaker plays Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Elton John as I wait for my soup and sandwich – which took a whopping 43 minutes. Yikes.
But the food… oh man.
EVERYTHING at Delirama is housemade – even the mustard – and all the ingredients are freshy fresh. Even the BBQ-style chips that come with every sandwich order are made in-house. I was blown off my feet.
The Matzo Ball Soup: The last time I ate this I was 10 years old at my uncle’s family’s Channukah celebration down in Los Angeles. It was not good. The Delirama rendition was a completely different dish. Light fluffy chicken-fat-laced “floater” balls, brown buttered herbs and veggies, and a light, delicious, chicken broth. So good I burned my mouth.
The O.G. Sandwich: House-made pastrami, 1000 island, mustard, gruyere cheese, and mustard vinaigrette coleslaw on thick housemade rye bread. My first thought: the pastrami tastes a little like ballpark franks without the grossness of ballpark franks. My second thought was that it’s the juiciest pastrami I’ve ever had. I caught a slight taste of vinegar that must’ve been in the slaw. The mustard chimed in at all the right spots and the thick slices of homemade rye hit at the end. Had this sando competed in the 1973 pastrami Olympics, it likely would have won. It’s also considerably less than the pastrami sandwich that’s 5 minutes away at Sauls (plus it conveniently comes WITH the mustard). It’s served with house made BBQ-flavored potato chips.
I didn’t see Cash, but Ana was working the order station, delivering the food to the tables and chatting up the customers – often thanking everyone for their support and for enduring the (rather long) wait for the food. I hear her tell another customer that the sherbert and banana-colored t-shirts are sustainably made. Of course they are. Ana projects all the passion and humility of a young upstart - and it’s part of what makes this place so enjoyable and popular. After almost 40 delicatessen reviews in two years, this might be my new favorite spot.
A big shout out to Alan Harris for turning me on to this place. Bravo, sir. Bravo.