I walked down East Houston Street on the Lower East Side on a chilly and dreary afternoon, scouring the neighborhood for a business where I could do my second interview after being turned down at three places. I then stumbled upon this appetizing store (haha) and I hesitated as to whether or not it was worth a shot, but I decided to give it a go.
I walked inside and I was immediately overcome by the strong smell of fish (lucky for me, I happen to love the smell). I noted that the store was fairly large and had a comfortable old-world feel. On the left side it had a counter on with scales and displays of smoked and cured fish (mostly salmon and herring) and on the right side it had refrigerated goods (also mostly fish) and other products (lox, bagels, caviar, dried fruits, olives, babka, macaroons, halvah, and more). I was struck by this wide variety of unique and authentic-looking foods and I also noticed that the signs in the store seemed old (the interviewee would later tell me that these are antique signs from when the store first opened) and that there were a lot of pictures in black and white on the walls – so I knew that this place must have an interesting history.
The store had few customers at the time – maybe about five or six, and it had five employees behind the counter. I walked up to an employee who was cutting fish and asked him if I could interview him for a school project that I am working on. He agreed but said that he would continue to work during the interview, which I said was fine. He introduced himself as Herman Vargas, the general manager of the store. He is a Dominican immigrant that has been working at Russ & Daughters for 37 years – since he was 18! I wondered how he felt working in what seemed to be a Jewish business that caters largely to the Jewish community, but he answered my question before I could even ask it. He says that he had originally only started working there because he needed a part-time job, but he soon developed a passion for the tight-knit working culture, home-like feel, delicious food and old-world ambience: “I’m from a small town in the Dominican Republic where everyone knows each other – and that’s what I sought out here. The moment I started working here, I felt at home and I developed an attachment to the store – to the family that owns it, to the store’s cultural heritage and history, and, of course, to the food.” Herman has even picked up some Yiddish over the years and in the interview it was readily apparent that he probably knows as much about Jewish cultural heritage as a Jew.
Herman then gave me a brief overview of the history of Russ & Daughters. In 1907, Joel Russ, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, arrived in New York. He started peddling schmaltz herring (Yiddish for herring caught just before spawning, when the fat (schmaltz) in the fish is at a maximum) from a pushcart on Orchard Street. At the time, the Lower East Side was a predominantly Jewish working-class neighborhood, and so the herring that Joel sold is what Herman calls “survival food” – it’s cheap and, because it’s salted, it doesn’t go bad. Joel’s pushcart business was moderately successful, and he was able to save up money to open a storefront on Orchard Street in 1914. With more space, Joel was able to expand the products he sold to include other types of fish – in particular, smoked salmon. His business boomed and in 1920 he relocated to the business’s current location at 179 East Houston Street because the new location had twice the amount of square footage. Since then, the business has been operated by multiple generations of the Russ family – the 4th generation (Niki and Josh, the latter of which I had the pleasure of meeting) is now running the show. Today Russ & Daughters has 20-25 permanent employees (it hires many others seasonally) and business is going well at this renowned cultural landmark.
Russ & Daughters has had a history of incredible success even through some very rough times, including the Great Depression, the food rationing of World War II and the neighborhood blight of the 1960s. Moreover, the store is able to succeed despite the numerous obstacles it constantly faces. Perhaps the greatest issue it has is finding the right people to hire – Russ & Daughters needs employees who are willing to dedicate a lot of time, including time around important holidays, to the business. Those employees also need to be passionate about their work and need to cherish the traditional food-making process in order to be happy and productive, since the traditional food-making processes used by Russ & Daughters are often painstakingly arduous. They cannot be indifferent to the store’s history or to the cultural values that define the place – in fact, they must embrace it and actively try to become a part of it. Another major obstacle that the store faces has to do with supplying: getting consistently high-quality merchandise from suppliers at a reasonable price is difficult. For instance, right now there is a shortage of high-quality wild salmon, and so the prices charged by suppliers has shot up, which in turn has forced Russ & Daughters to raise their own prices. However, thankfully, rent or lack of customers are not issues for Russ & Daughters – Joel was shrewd enough to buy the store back when property values were low in the neighborhood and the store has an international customer base made up of thousands of people.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned periods of hardship and regular obstacles faced by the business, it is indubitable that today the business is booming and will continue to be extraordinarily successful for the foreseeable future. The clientele of Russ & Daughters has expanded from its small, localized Jewish customer base to a much larger international and cosmopolitan one. The cured and smoked fish sold at the store is no longer “survival food,” but rather, it is now upscale food that can fetch prices in hundreds of dollars per pound. The store’s current owners, Niki and Josh, have also opened two other locations: one is a cafe on Orchard Street and another is a Kosher store located uptown. Although these two new locations are clearly different from the original Russ & Daughters appetizing store, they also have the same old-world ambience that the original location has and sell many of the same products (I checked both of them out).
Something else I should mention is the type of store that Russ & Daughters defines itself to be: an appetizing store. An appetizing store is best understood as a typically Jewish store that sells foods that one eats with bagels – including both dairy and “parve” (neither dairy nor meat) food items such as lox (smoked salmon), whitefish, and cream cheese spreads. The foods are typically eaten for breakfast or lunch and, based on Jewish kashrut dietary laws, include no meat products (kosher fish products are not considered meat). Appetizing stores differ from Jewish delicatessens in that delis sell meats while appetizing stores sell fish and dairy products. Russ & Daughters is one of the last appetizing stores in New York City, and, according to Herman, it is “committed to preserving and promoting this important food culture.”
Finally, I would like to discuss the object that best represents the identity of Russ & Daughters: schmaltz herring. Although it is not the best-selling food item at the store (that distinction goes to smoked salmon), it is the staple food item – it is what defines the store. It was what Joel first started selling from his pushcart and it is what got the business started. The process of preparing it, cutting it, presenting it and sourcing it properly is a very intricate old-world process that embodies the cultural heritage of the store. At this point, it is more about the cultural and historical importance of it than the financial aspect. As Herman put it in the interview, “It’s beyond doing something to make money – it’s to preserve tradition.” Clearly, schmaltz herring encapsulates the traditions upheld by Russ & Daughters for generations and it has made the store the single most well-known place in New York City to buy high-quality herring. R.W. Apple describes this perfectly in a New York Times article he wrote in 2002: “Russ & Daughters, a bastion of tradition on the Lower East Side since 1914, is the city’s herring-to-go headquarters.”
Anyway, fast forward to the end of the interview. As I was putting my notes away and getting ready to go, Herman left me with some words of wisdom: “Whatever you do, put your heart into it.” I was reminded of this later when I read the last chapter of Mark Federman’s book Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House that Herring Built. In it, Mark, who was the third-generation owner of Russ & Daughters, says: “We’re proud that Russ & Daughters is different from the rest of the food world. We’re not an impersonal big-box store; we don’t sell mass-produced, extruded and prepackaged products. We live and breathe the most important Russ family traditions – a passion for what we sell and a dedication to providing the best possible service to our customers.” It’s clear that Herman is a key part of this equation and he is indubitably an honorary member of the Russ family by virtue of his hard work, dedication, and passion. He has taken his own advice to heart and is keeping the very essence of Russ & Daughters alive – and will hopefully do so for years to come, because, according to Anthony Bourdain, Russ & Daughters is a place you should eat at before you die: “Russ & Daughters started as a pushcart nearly a century ago, and it now serves some of the last traditional Eastern European Jewish-style herring and belly lox, smoked sable, and sturgeon. This is what New Yorkers do better than anybody else. And here’s where they do it.”
