If only our own investments were as promising. “She handed over every dime,” he says, mock ruefully. According to Zvi, his wife has donated all proceeds from that and other labors to his growing enterprise, most recently helping to purchase two French bread ovens, each dangling a price tag of more than $100 grand, as well as a Swiss oven for pastry, a contraption for boiling bagels, and assorted accoutrements, including the very baskets French bakers use. The boys, along with their sister, Simona, 32, grew up here, attending Hawthorne Valley School K-12, where their mother Beatrice taught for many years. “You’re looking at the guy who brined it and smoked it,” says ODB’s owner Zvi Cohen, a Brooklyn-ite, transplanted to Chatham some thirty years ago, who took root and thrived, first as a school teacher, then as a wholesale baker, and finally as the owner of a burgeoning restaurant-and-baking empire that he now runs with the aid of his sons Gavriel, 30, and Yonatan, 29. Until, that is, ODB’s pastrami swaggered into town.Īll the more telling that it arrived as raw brisket.
(A notable exception is the Old Chatham Country Store & Café, but that’s in the countryside 15 minutes north of town.) Although one can stave off hunger, even have a good meal, in several of the local eateries, there’s little evidence of kitchen crews reaching for the stars, striving to make food that could be described as “memorable,” let alone “world class ” the sort of food, in short, worth going out of your way for. For every promising new shop, business, or restaurant that opens, another shuts down.įor those stalwarts that do make it, at least among the restaurateurs, ambition seems to be in modest supply. Yet, much to the satisfaction of some people, who like it as is, humble and unpretentious, the town remains stuck midway to tourist glory. A once lively and raffish railroad town where the train has long since just passed through, Chatham seems perpetually on the brink of a renaissance. Yet, despite this great infrastructure and several shops well worth traveling to, Chatham hasn’t become a big draw for vacationers and weekenders, the way Hudson, Rhinebeck, Great Barrington, and some others towns in the four-county region are. Not that there’s anything wrong with Chatham, with its charming commercial district filled with unsullied turn-of-the-last-century storefronts, including a propitiously sited flatiron building with a clock tower. One is tempted to ask: What’s a knockout like you doing in a town like this?
Lean, deeply smoked, and peppery, it’s served warm with a pickle and slaw - pastrami in its Platonic form. Take the pastrami on rye at the new Our Daily Bread Bakery & Café in Chatham, NY (not to be confused with its elder, gluten-free, vegetarian sibling at the north end of town that confusingly goes by the very same name). Sometimes a sandwich is more than just a sandwich.
0 kommentar(er)
