http://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/index.ssf/2010/02/small_bites_a_sparkling_riesli.html 
Christopher FarberDavid Sax3 QUESTIONS
A short chat about what's cooking Freelance journalist
David Sax grew up loving Yitz' Deli in his hometown of Toronto, and these days travels the globe reporting stories for publications such as New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and GQ. While on the road, he's tasted a world's worth of pastrami and corned beef. He's in Portland today, Feb. 2, promoting a new book focused on the challenges that delicatessens face.
Q: You spent the past few years searching for the world's great Jewish delicatessens. From the title of your book -- "Save the Deli" -- it sounds like you're troubled by what you found. How is the great deli tradition being threatened? A: Delis have declined in great numbers over the past several decades, from thousands to a few hundred, and the threat comes on several fronts: First, it's economically difficult to run Jewish delis compared with other restaurants. It requires skilled staff who can work with specialty foods that are deceptively troublesome to prepare and serve. Despite the fact that they practically exist to serve them, corned beef and pastrami sandwiches are the least profitable items for delis to sell. Second, there's a cultural drain of Jews away from Jewish delicatessens. Unlike Chinese restaurants or taquerias, there simply aren't any new Jewish immigrants from Poland or Romania coming over to open up delis ... and they haven't been coming since the Nazis wiped out that whole world. With each generation that comes of age in America, fewer Jews are involved in delis. That dilutes the tradition. Toss in competition from cheap sandwich chains like Subway, and the fear over fat and salt, and it's a perfect storm.
Q: Of all the places you visited, Portland's own Kenny & Zuke's Delicatessen stood out. It's a very new business that's not steeped in the history of places like New York's Katz's Deli, which has been around since the 1880s. What made a place that's only been open a couple of years so special? A: Kenny & Zuke's didn't start out with any grand ideas. It was two guys who made pastrami as an experiment and sold it at a farmers market. But they built everything with a focus on the quality of the food foremost, and never tried to replicate some version of the "New York" deli, with taxicab murals and other shtick. They began from scratch, baking the bread and bagels in-house, curing the lox, smoking the pastrami, baking the rugelach, and the flavors really stood out because of that. They're not reinventing Jewish delicatessen in any radical way. They're simply doing it right, with a respect for the tradition but without indulging in the shticky nostalgia that too many delicatessens focus their energy on.
Q: Think of this as the delicatessen equivalent to the eternal "boxers or briefs" question: Pastrami or corned beef, and why? A: Just bread, because I go commando.
David Sax speaks at 6 p.m. today, Feb. 2, at Kenny & Zuke's Delicatessen, 1038 S.W. Stark St.; $15, including food and drink; reservations at 503-222-3354 or
info@kennyandzukes.com. Signed copies of "Save the Deli"
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24, 336 pages) will be available at the event.
-- Grant Butler