Stopsky's lox & bagel, menu board, baker Meltzer
It was never easy, being a deli, especially a Jewish deli. French charcuteries or Italian macellerie generally started as butcher shops and added sausages, cold cuts and vegetable salads as they grew. The early Jewish delis, on the other hand, were products of necessity, providing religiously acceptable meat amidst the profusion of Kosher dietary laws. And it's hard, outside the urban enclaves of the East Coast, to maintain those traditions today. We wrote about Katz's ("I'll have what she's having"), going strong on Noo Yawk's Lower East Side, almost five years ago; and about Goldbergs', in Factoria, nine years ago, which struggled at the beginning but has since found its footing (mostly as an ecumenical sandwich shop).
No such luck for Stopsky's on Mercer Island, which announced today that it would close at the end of the week. This despite an admirable three-word slogan: Eat, Enjoy, Return.
The name was genuine: In 1905, four Stopsky brothers from a Jewish shtetl in the Ukraine arrived in the US and promptly changed their name to Sanderson, which sounded "less ethnic." A century later, Gilbert Stopsky's grandson Jeff, a former Microsoftie, decided to open a deli that honored his family's culinary heritage.
Stopsky's got its start in 2011, with celebrity chef Robin Leventhal at the helm. After she left, Andrew Meltzer took over the kitchen, and for a time even made his own bagels. Stopsky's continued to do its own baking, preserving, curing (pastrami, corned beef,) and pickling. A bar and additional seats were added last summer. Food & Wine named Stopsky's one of America's best delis earlier this year, and it was included in a roll call of "new artisanal Jewish delis" in The New York Times. But it wasn't enough. Not enough "returns."
If you were adept at reading tea leaves, you might have predicted this. The deli's website promised, "Our new fresh sheet will feature cuisines from regions where Jewish people have settled. First up is Italy, site of the oldest Jewish community outside Israel. Rome and Venice contain former ghettos, today vibrant areas of food and culture." Trouble is, that "news," the most recent post, was well over a year old. The deli's Facebook page was rarely updated, and while you might say that Mercer Island's older residents didn't mind the lack of a social media presence, you could also argue that ignoring social media was a sign of a disconnected owner.
Here's the text of a sign posted on Stopsky's door today:
Stopsky's was a project of the heart whose mission was to reconnect people to Jewish heritage, connect the community, and create homemade Jewish comfort cuisine from scratch. We achieved a lot of this, but in the end could not discover the magic formula to break even. Never willing to compromise our house-made meats, breads, pickles or sourcing, we made the call to not be in the industry. No regrets.
All the deli's packaged goods (pickles, mustards, and such) are 50 percent off, including their house-cured, smoked olives. Hurry on over for one last Reuben. No magic formulas but a few bargains.
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