Landmark N.Y. Deli Losing Out to Housemate

NEW YORK — For years, Jews living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side made a regular pilgrimage to Ratner’s for its home-style pirogen, blintzes, gefilte fish, matzo brie, baskets of freshly baked onion rolls and notoriously surly wait service.

But the flickering neon sign in front of Ratner’s -- a New York institution offering some of the finest kosher dairy dining anywhere -- is losing its luster.

At the same time, Lansky Lounge & Grill, a trendy steakhouse and martini bar carved out of the back half of Ratner’s in 1997, is burning brighter than ever.

And that could mean the end of Ratner’s, a landmark that has been in place for 84 years.

“Unfortunately, Ratner’s is fading away and Lansky’s is coming up in the world,” said co-owner Fred Harmatz.

“The way this neighborhood has changed, people who come into Lansky’s now, if you asked them what a bowl of borscht was, they’d think you were speaking a foreign language.”

Last year, faced with a dwindling clientele and construction on the nearby Williamsburg Bridge spanning the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, Harmatz and his younger brother, Robert, decided to open Ratner’s on Sundays only, while operating Lansky’s seven nights a week.

“The neighborhood changed, but we’ve tried to keep this going as long as we can,” Robert Harmatz said. “When the lounge started five years ago, we began rethinking what we were doing here.”

In recent years, the once-heavily Jewish neighborhood of turn-of-the century tenements and discount storefronts has attracted art galleries, boutiques -- and eateries such as Lansky’s.

But during its heyday from World War II until the early 1970s, Ratner’s was run by the Harmatzes’ father, Harold, 24 hours a day.

“You’d never know if it was 3 in the morning or 3 in the afternoon here, it was always so busy,” Fred Harmatz said.

Despite a reputation for its dour waiters, Ratner’s was popular with Nelson Rockefeller, John F. Kennedy and other politicians, who simultaneously came shopping for the Jewish vote and Ratner’s famous breads, cakes and desserts -- all baked fresh on the premises.

It also became popular with Jewish mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, for whom Lansky Lounge is named.

“Meyer came in here all the time, and he always sat in the back,” Fred Harmatz said. “Well, he once said to my father, ‘I might be your best customer. You should name a table after me.’ My father did him one better and named the whole back room after him.”

The brothers kept the name when the back room was turned into a retro-style lounge. And in keeping with the mobster theme, the front door -- tucked away in an alley -- is outfitted with a speak-easy-style sliding eye-panel. Jacob Harmatz, the Harmatzes’ grandfather, opened Ratner’s with his brother-in-law, Alex Ratner, in 1905, deciding on the name after flipping a coin.

After Ratner sold his share, Jacob moved the restaurant in 1918 from Pitt Street to its current location at 138 Delancey St., where its vegetarian dairy menu became wildly successful with the area’s overwhelmingly Jewish population.

“In a way, their emphasis on healthy, vegetarian food was very much ahead of its time,” said Jenna Weissman Joselit, a professor at Princeton University and author of several books detailing modern urban Jewish history.

Eventually, the neighborhood changed, the Jews moved out or grew old, and the menu became too much of an anachronism for the new generation.

“Over time, the culinary preferences of kosher-keeping Jews have gotten much more ... sophisticated,” Joselit said.

Fred Harmatz said the change really started in the 1960s, when Hispanics and other groups began moving into the neighborhood and Jews started leaving for the suburbs.

In the early 1980s, the migration of new people to the area began to snowball.

“The demographic of the neighborhood really began to change dramatically then and suddenly all these businesses that had been around for 70 or 80 years started going out of business right and left,” said Robin Marcato, community liaison for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

But Ratner’s hung on -- barely.

At that time, with the city experiencing a massive increase in the number of Orthodox Jews, the Harmatzes decided to make the restaurant strictly kosher. In fact, when Lansky Lounge first opened as just a bar, it remained closed on Friday nights out of respect for the Sabbath.

“Whoever heard of a bar closed on Friday nights?” Fred asked.

Then, in 1999, the Harmatzes turned the lounge into a restaurant offering a non-kosher menu, and that spelled non-kosher for Ratner’s as well since the two shared the kitchen.

“It was nothing against religion,” Fred said. “It was a business decision.”

A decision that drove away the Orthodox crowd, and ultimately may see Ratner’s demise.

The brothers have recently toyed with the idea of selling all or part of the nearly 15,000-square-foot space that includes Ratner’s, Lansky Lounge, a kosher factory that produces frozen blintzes, potato pancakes and soups, and three apartments that have been vacant since 1958.

“We don’t really want to sell,” Fred Harmatz said. “But if someone came along with the right price, I’d have to say we’d consider it.”

For now, Ratner’s on Sundays still teems with nostalgic Jews desperate for a taste of marmaliga, a cornmeal cake with cheese, or hammantashen, a pastry.

“Invariably, it’s the lox and onion omelet that always gets me in here,” said Milton Crystal, a lawyer from Syracuse, N.Y.