Gourmet Groceries Trump Rascal House

03Apr08

Not too long ago I read an article reporting on the closing of Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House Restaurant. Yes, after 54 years anchoring New York-style, Jewish-American culture into the bedrock of South Florida, the establishment has given way to South Beach’s premiere gourmet superstore, Epicure Market. Once independent businesses, both Epicure and Rascal House were acquired by the National Deli Corporation (or Jerry’s Famous Deli, Inc.?), whose bottom-line was ostensibly effected by Rascal’s diminishing clientèle. So, just as New York recently fortified its stronghold on South Florida with the opening of Gansevoort South, it has relinquished control of Miami Beach’s northern perimeter. Or has it? Jewish-American cultural icon replaced by gourmet groceries. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like New York.

I am loathe to see Rascal House go. Not only will I never again have the opportunity to use the “secret door,” which opened at 4:00 and allowed patrons in-the-know to duck the ridiculously long dinner lines that wound around the property; lines full of shaky perfumed hands adorned with oversized, 1950’s dinner rings and bracing for the weight of oversized pastrami sandwiches served just beyond the glass doors; to sit among whimsical 6-ft. plaster statues of “rascals,” little white devils that watched over us from pedestals above and between our booths; and to wait anxiously, hungrily, for our bread basket, which would always come filled with small onion rolls, challah rolls, pumpernickel onion rolls, and other fresh-baked goodies that the waitress would bag and that my grandmother would slip into her “pocketbook” (along with some packets of Sweet’N Low). I will miss all of that, but I suppose those opportunities were lost long before Rascal House shut their doors.

No, what saddens me most about the end of Rascal House is that it represents the end of an era and the end of a generation, both in Florida and across the nation. In Florida, it signifies a shift in status from “God’s waiting room” to bastion of contemporary glamor and yuppie-dom. Long gone are the days when pastel-stucco hotel/motels lined the beaches, when traffic wasn’t congested, when small, blue-haired ladies would weed through roasted chickens and loaves of rye bread in Publix. South Florida has changed as the first wave of (largely Jewish) emigrating northerners came and left.

South Florida, however, isn’t the only place that has changed. The gentrification of the Lower East Side of Manhattan has resulted in a watering-down of the Jewish-American culture there, as well, resulting in a similar Rascal-House-come-Epicure-Market phenomenon. I suppose that the lives of cities are cyclical — just ask the inhabitants of Astoria, who have watched the Grecian character of their neighborhood give way to the tastes and demands of newly immigrating Middle Eastern residents . The fabric of our communities change as first-comers leave and newcomers arrive. In South Florida and on the Lower East side, newcomers are less interested in “chicken in the pot” than “tarragon-roasted organic chicken breasts.” Such is life. It would be nice if someone — maybe a historical society — would document the culture and vibrancy of these lost communities. I hope someone has. It’s too sad to think that a couple of generations are all it will take for them to be gone forever.

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