In 1907, Joel Russ, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia, Poland, arrived in New York. He peddled schmaltz herring (Yiddish for herring caught just before spawning) for a living from a pushcart on Orchard Street. At the time, the Lower East Side was a predominantly Jewish working-class neighborhood in which schmaltz herring was “survival food.” Joel’s pushcart business was very successful, and he was able to save up money to open an appetizing shop (a place that sells a variety of smoked and cured fish, bagels, homemade salads and cream cheeses) 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 rapidly expanded its operations 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 booming 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 neighborhood blight of the 1960s and the repeal of the Sunday blue laws in the 1980s. These periods of hardship drove out many other family-owned small businesses in the Lower East Side along with the neighborhood’s predominantly Jewish inhabitants. However, in spite of these difficulties, Russ & Daughters has been able to thrive where others have not. It is one of the last appetizing shops left in New York City, or anywhere in the country, for that matter. In New York City, up until the 1960s, there were appetizing stores in every borough and in almost every neighborhood. On the Lower East Side alone there were, at one point, thirty appetizing shops. In his book Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built, Mark Russ Federman says: “From the 1920s through the end of World War II, there were twenty to thirty appetizing stores on the Lower East Side. Many owners shared Grandpa Russ’s career trajectory – from pushcart to store. But none that I know of, save for Russ & Daughters, made it past the second generation.”
However, despite all the difficulties Russ & Daughters has endured over the years, I have not been able to find any sources that discuss them except for Federman’s book. The newspaper articles and other sources I found only exalt Russ & Daughters and its delicious delicacies, and all were written in the post-World War II era. It can be safely assumed that Russ & Daughters was not written much about before World War II because it was only one of many appetizing shops in the 1920s and 1930s, whereas it was only one of the few surviving ones thereafter.
In a 1953 New York Times article, Jane Nickerson says that Russ & Daughters is a perfect place for those “with a taste for smoked fish and the energy to seek it out.” She briefly explains the history of the business and discusses the intricacy of the smoking/pickling process and its importance in making the fish “delicious” and in giving Russ & Daughters its reputation. She also and states that “…Russ and Daughters, connoisseurs agree, is excellent of its kind. A former ambassador to the Netherlands thought so much of it that he used to have the shop ship him delicacies abroad.” Nickerson goes on to quote the owner at the time, Morris Gold, who insists that Russ & Daughters only sources its fish from the “purest” places, like remote Canadian lakes, which makes its products superior. He also argues that the store’s processing techniques are first-rate.
In a 1965 New York Times article, Nan Ickeringill describes a variety different business in the Lower East Side. In particular, he discusses Russ & Daughters within a historical context in which many customers from the suburbs or outer boroughs go to the store on Sundays to shop (only stores in the Lower East Side were open on Sundays in New York City at the time due to the Sunday blue laws). Whereas in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s the customers who frequented these stores lived in the neighborhood, in the 1940s and beyond most customers lived outside the neighborhood – which would eventually result in a decline in overall sales for many long-standing small businesses – but not for Russ & Daughters. In this 1965 article, Mark Federman is quoted as saying “If you think this is busy, you should see us on Saturday nights. We stay open until 10 that night – 11 in the winter” in the midst of the Lower East Side’s poverty and crime-infested phase.
Russ & Daughters went on to endure some of the most difficult decades of its history, up until the 1990s and 2000s, when the neighborhood was revitalized. Recently, it has been extraordinarily popularized by Anthony Bourdain and a new documentary. In a 2010 article in The Guardian, Bourdain calls Russ & Daughters one of New York’s best food places and says that “Russ & Daughters occupies that rare and tiny place on the mountaintop reserved for those who are not just the oldest and the last – but also the best.”
In 2014, on the centennial of Russ & Daughter’s opening, a well-crafted documentary called The Sturgeon Queens (named after the daughters of Joel Russ) was released. It features two of the original “daughters” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and is a comedic yet very informative film that provides a different perspective from that of Mark Federman’s book (it is told through the lens of Joel’s two daughters instead).
Thanks to the extraordinary success of the original appetizing store, which can in part be attributed to positive media coverage, the current owners of Russ & Daughters have recently been able to open a Russ & Daughters Cafe and a Russ & Daughters Restaurant – both of which are also flourishing and sell food that is just as delicious as the bagel and lox of the original location. Today the original location has almost 1500 reviews on Yelp and a 4.5 rating. It is difficult to imagine a future in the Lower East Side in which Russ & Daughter’s does not play a role – it is an enormous part of its history and will hopefully continue to be.
