Jankelowitz - Jacks Wife Freda

Its a balmy Friday night in June in Manhattans Greenwich Village, and the glass doors of Jacks Wife Freda are opened to the street. From the soft glow of the restaurant, an energetic hum of chatter spills onto the sidewalk and encourages the crowd gathered there to wait just a little longer for a table. Inside, past the full banquets where carafes of ros are ringed in condensation, past the small bar packed three bodies deep, co-owner Dean Jankelowitz swings open the double doors of the kitchen. One more order of zucchini chips for table thirteen on the fly, brother! he hollers to the expediter. The decibel level of his voice reflects the frenetic clamor in the kitchena good ten degrees hotter than the humid evening air outside. The three chefs on the line are working at Mach speed, a hand flipping a butterflied chicken as the skin crisps on the hot grill, a wrist flicking the handle of a panful of vegetables in a bubbling, spicy coconut curry. You got it! the expediter bellows over the din of the stoves.

Dean flies out of the kitchen moments later, handing off the zucchini to a server, Table thirteen, seat two. She nods and weaves her way through the crowd with the precision of a ballerina.

Deans wife and partner, Maya, is hovering over the stereo system, tinkering with the bass on a reggae beat. She carries an old-world sense of superstition with her. If the music is personal and the volume is just so, the songs will serve as a siren beckoning in a steady flow of dinersnever mind that at 9:00 P.M. the place is packed to the gills and the wait is thirty minutes long. Waving hello with one hand and clutching a notepad in the other, Maya breezes back to the door to take the name of a new party hoping for a table, offering them a fresh mint lemonade while they wait.

Dean clears the plates from a family of four and suggests they split his favorite malva pudding for dessert. Whats malva? the mother asks. Oh, man, you have to try it. Ill send you one... His voice trails off as he turns back toward the kitchen. Dean is a notorious mumbler but quick with a witty one-liner before vanishing to attend to another pressing task. The family seems momentarily confusedDid you catch what he said?until Dean returns with four spoons and a sponge cake drizzled in warm caramel sauce. The kids eyes go wide and Dean winks back.

By 1:00 A . M ., the last satiated diners have sauntered out into the summer night. The chairs are stacked, the lights switched off, and the space is silent save for the purr of the wine refrigerators. Dean and Maya pull down the gate to the restaurant and walk past the noisy bars on Spring Street, past the weekend carousers stumbling on the Bowery, and head home to the Lower East Side. One can almost imagine that same path homeward about a century prior, when the neighborhood was the new home and refuge for hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. Every other block housed a synagogue or a Yiddish theater. Families would have been asleep, stacked like sardines, in the tenements. And the pushcarts that held the vegetables, meats, and pickles that so many of those families ate during their Sabbath dinners earlier that evening were tied up for the night in the quiet downtown streets.

Food as an expression of familial love is one of the oldest and most universal of concepts, although the contemporary interpretation of comfort food has seized American culinary culture with a tight grip. In a country composed of so many immigrants, cuisines once thought of as colloquial in their land of origin are transformed into something exotic in the new American kitchen. Traditional dishes have been reshapedfused, deconstructed, tailored to the New World palate while remaining rooted in the flavors of their native countries. In New York, perhaps no beloved food transplant embodies this concept more than Jewish cuisine.

Jacks Wife Freda, the pair of downtown cafs whose signs bear the illustrated face of their namesake grandma, is where Dean and Maya Jankelowitz have created a mecca of Jewish comfort-food dining. Both New York immigrants, they have managed to meld the Ashkenazi and Sephardic dishes of their respective childhoods with the twang and spices of South African and Israeli flavors. But the comforts of their restaurants arent limited to food. Something in their detailed coziness makes them worth queuing up for and inspires diners to linger after the plates are cleared. Consummate hospitality serves as the bedrock of their restaurants, and the communal, casual vibe feels oddly relaxed considering the flagship location is smack-dab in the middle of SoHo, one of the citys most kinetic neighborhoods. But there is a sense of traveling home when eating at Jacks Wife Freda, and its no mistake that the restaurants are named after Deans grandparents. Everyone has an origin story. Mayas and Deans stories started some 6,000 miles apart and eventually converged in a love song to New York.

On a Friday afternoon in Killarney, a suburb of Johannesburg, the spring air carries the delicate honeyed perfume of the sugarbush, as the waning sun casts its last slanted rays of citrine warmth over the neighborhood. Inside Fredas kitchen there are wafts of sweet challah baking, simmering matzo ball soup, the snap of chicken schnitzel frying. Its the mid-eighties. Were in South Africa, and Friday afternoon in this predominantly Jewish neighborhood means one thing: the coming of Shabbat. Fredas ten-year-old grandson, Dean, is playing cards with his siblings in the living room and sneaking chocolates as family and friends gather by the minute. Freda emerges from the kitchen, her wig styled in a perfect bouffant and her arms covered in costume bangles, telling her husband, Jack, to fix her a cocktail. Their house fills with the raucous laughter of neighbors, arguments between cousins, and grandchildren shrieking as they play games in the yard. For some, hosting forty people any given night may be an overwhelming event, but for Jack and Freda its a normal Shabbata familial comedy of errors, a delicious feast.