The other day, hours after I’d hung up the phone with the chef Mark Strausman, he accidentally called me back. “Oops!” he said. “That’s what happens when your fingers are covered in olive oil.” Strausman was at his new restaurant, Mark’s Off Madison (41 Madison Avenue), which débuted last month near Madison Square Park. His hands have been covered in olive oil for most of his sixty-odd years. In the early nineties, the Queens native opened a series of Italian restaurants, including Campagna and the original Coco Pazzo. In 1996, he created Freds at Barneys, turning it into an institution with satellites in Beverly Hills and Chicago.
Last year, Barneys went bankrupt, and Strausman was let go. Never mind: he was already hard at work on Mark’s Off Madison, which he abbreviates as M.O.M., to emphasize the Jewish-mother theme. Devotees of Freds will be delighted to find many of its signature dishes resurrected here, including the chopped chicken salad (with avocado, string beans, and pears), Estelle’s chicken soup, and bolognese lasagna. But hand-painted letters on a glass wall in the dining room advertise what is, in my opinion, M.O.M.’s biggest draw. “Not Your Grandfather’s Bagels,” they read, with “Not” crossed out. In the August of his career, Strausman is chasing his youth, attempting to re-create the bagels (plus bialys) that he remembers eating as a kid.
He started this quest at Freds “because I was having a midlife crisis and wanting to get rid of my motorcycle,” he told me. “Bread-making became a passion because there’s an insanity about it.” At M.O.M., he has a proper wood-fired bagel oven, which helps attain a distinctly crunchy exterior—coated in toppings only lightly, and on just one side, so as not to compete with the flavor of the malt-infused dough. Straussie’s bagels, as he calls them (available only on weekends), are both denser and smaller than most of their latter-day equivalents. The increased puffiness of bagels is not, Strausman explained, a result of the broader supersize phenomenon but, rather, of technological advancement; to make bagels automatically, you need a wetter dough or else the machine will jam. More water means more fuel for yeast, which means more rising and expanding. Strausman is preserving the dying art of hand-rolling.
So, too, is a young woman named Elyssa Heller, across the river, at her indefinitely running pop-up, Edith’s (60 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, in the pizzeria Paulie Gee’s), which offers what you might call your great-great-grandmother’s bagels—hand-rolled but also twisted, as in Old World Poland. They’re as personal to Heller as Strausman’s are to him: boiled in water flavored with honey instead of malt, they refer also to Montreal bagels (Heller went to college in Canada), and are made with flour milled from heirloom grains grown in Illinois, her home state.
Edith was Heller’s great-aunt, who once ran a deli in Brooklyn, and whose archive of recipes, many scrawled on paper plates or napkins, inspired some of the pop-up’s dishes, including the smoked-trout salad, served on a bagel with house-cultured cream cheese, sliced radish, and trout roe. Otherwise, Heller aims to explore the Jewish diaspora. She hesitated before offering schnecken, traditional German-Jewish sweet buns whose name (German for “snails”) doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. “I was a little nervous that people wouldn’t get it and they couldn’t pronounce it,” Heller told me the other day. But, she said, “we want to tell stories with our food.”
Edith’s schnecken encase sour cherries and Turkish pistachios, or honey seasoned with the paprika-forward Middle Eastern spice mix baharat. But perhaps the best represented of the planet’s scattered populations of Jews is the one right here in New York, in the form of a bagel sandwich called the BEC&L. That’s “B” for bacon (with apologies to the rebbes), paired with egg, Cheddar cheese, and a gloriously crispy, thick golden latke. (Mark’s Off Madison bagel platters $22-$38. Edith’s bagel sandwiches $10.50-$12.50.) ♦
