Pictures of a Fading World: On Ben Katchor's "The Dairy Restaurant"

Ben Katchor | The Dairy Restaurant | Shocken/Nextbook | 2020 | 499 Pages

Cartoonist and illustrator Ben Katchor’s latest is a book so widely reviewed or commented upon, at least twice in the New York Times alone, that is it difficult to ask what has not been said. Actually, there’s a lot.

Commentators on the book have been interested mainly if not only in the phenomenon of the “dairy restaurant” itself and the complexity—what I would call a dialectical complexity—in Katchor’s presentation of its history. If the late Guyanese-British novelist Wilson Harris (the “James Joyce of the Caribbean”) wrote that hidden memories of earlier cultures remain within us and that we need to reveal their contents for our sakes but also theirs, then Katchor has been actively at work in this effort, in his unique way. Katchor’s sense of tragedy is captured, again and again, in his depiction of lower-class Jews fleeing their cultural legacy in search of upward mobility and sophistication. (An earlier book, Ben Katchor: Conversations, edited by Ian Gordon, will offer readers more to ponder.)

For starters, longtime Katchor devotees will be startled at the balance of text-and-art, so much in favor of his prose that this book might be described as “self-illustrated.” His art is less dense, reflective, and ironic than in earlier works, but that is not much to say in a Katchor creation because the complexity never leaves our eye. Indeed, this author is arguably the most thoughtful or depth-seeking in the whole field of comic art, at least in the English language.

And there is something else startling, even if it takes place only in the last two hundred pages or so. Readers see so many Yiddish (and some English) menus and advertisements that we get a look at the Yiddish world in all its intricacies, especially but not only of its manifestations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. This is a world that has slipped away entirely except for the occasional Hassidic corner of the world—much as the Yiddish press itself that published the ads calling attention to these most curious phenomena of cuisine. 

Katchor saw the dairy restaurants, took part in their social lives, without needing to think about it. Later, he revisited these eateries with intent. Others of his generation wanted to escape the confinement of ethnicity; others still tried to turn ethnicity into something grasping, exclusionary, or simply high-priced. But Katchor’s curiosity and dictated a more nuanced understanding. Here, Katchor’s own experiences in Brooklyn and Manhattan of the 1950s-90s, among restaurant cultures now almost entirely vanished, come to make sense. That is, they make sense along with the neighborhood bodegas with penny candy and soft drink bottles sunk in dark, cold water, Egg Creams, a rare delicacy today, and above all (for him) vast ranges of comic books, all part of the same picture.

His art, then, is most unusual but suited to the text of the dairy restaurant and its menu. Like the lowly apple in the Garden of Eden, the dairy restaurant’s diet may be traced back to the date, the reputed aphrodisiac, that excited an unbearable lust. According to Katchor’s wonderfully imaginative retelling, the Fall of Man actually took place in the “first private eating place open to the public”! The real First Couple thereby established their own identity in the world, beyond the suffocating, insular Garden. The Great Maker (or Makher) eventually allowed humans to eat meat. Meanwhile, somehow or other, the celestial afterworld remained… vegetarian. Thus, the dairy restaurant.

Here Katchor traces a long history from genuinely ancient times to the present. Many peculiarities, like the eating of chicken with milk in some parts of the Jewish world and not others, are described and analyzed. The Jewish merchant becomes the original traveler who needs to “eat out,” finding an adequate dietary rest-stop. Somewhere in the seventeenth century, vegetarianism is reborn for a variety of reasons, first of all, for sanitation, but second of all, for moral purposes: meat-eating leads to violence, a mentality of violence. A memory remains that in the past paradise, all had known peace.

Travel, in the commercializing Middle Ages, was already leading to Jews eating great Italian food; scenes from the Garden of Eden were even painted on the walls of their eateries. These and other grand pastoral dreams of a lost paradise promoted the attractiveness of restaurants great and small in Europe’s emerging cultural capitals during the Enlightenment.

Somewhere in here, Reform Judaism arrives, and so do the cults of milk-cures for illness, if and only if the milk comes from a safe, i.e., recent source. The milk cure flourishes in the late nineteenth century.

Katchor takes nearly 200 pages just to get to the twentieth century and the thriving dairy-bar business. Dairy restaurants grow amidst Jewish socialism, persecution, and escape to the New World, especially North America. Poor Jews could not afford restaurant meals. But even a modest rise in status brought a wild variety of meals and ambiance. As Katchor observes, it is possible that the utilitarian dairy restaurant was the least memorialized in all this, because it was typically small and functional, serving a lower-class Jewish clientele seeking healthy food at low prices.

The generic “dairy bar,” a subset seen more often far from New York, did not even need to be Jewish, let alone kosher. These seem to have retained the old sense (especially before modern medicine for hypertension) that meatless meals soothed the stomach and the nerves. They could not survive the rise of Kentucky Fried Chicken and other chain outlets, and perhaps their clientele had always been middle-aged or older. Stories of individual owners, who represent family these businesses’ struggles to survive, are most touching. When they did succeed in Manhattan and other sites, Show Business big shots become regulars, and the cafes themselves begin to appear in the gossip columns of newspapers. 

Near the end of this volume, Katchor offers his reminiscences about this fading world. For readers who glimpsed it themselves, Katchor’s reflections are a cause to remember the talkative waiters, lingering ambiance, and almost indigestibly thick sandwich meat—always to be washed down with celery-tonic soda—of Yiddishkayt. The waiters were old, and the customers were old, so much so that young people attracted mostly friendly attention and a little chatting at every opportunity, wanted or unwanted. Then again, young people could be feared as drug addicts or even anti-Semites, no matter how unlikely this might be. 

Overall, The Dairy Restaurant is best served small and repeated servings. I am certain not to be the first reviewer to offer this quip.