A Literary Feast: Recreating 10 Fictional Meals in Brooklyn
“How about a sandwich for now? Turkey on a kaiser, plenty of mustard.”
Zeod nodded to his second, an indolent Dominican kid who moved to the slicer. Zeod never made sandwiches himself. But he’d taught his countermen well, to slice extraordinarily thin and drape the meat as it slid off the blade, so it fell in bunches, rather than stacking airlessly, to make a sandwich with that fluffy compressability I craved.
Lionel Essrog likes to eat. He is even discriminating about where to get the best White Castle hamburgers (there aren’t any good ones in New York anymore, he doesn’t think) and he knows what makes a good deli sandwich, namely, it’s all about how the meat is sliced and piled on the bread. Lionel frequents Zeod’s deli on Smith Street and, lucky for us, this is a real place and we can go there too! I love when that happens. In reality, “Zeod’s” is actually Ziad’s Gourmet, but otherwise, it’s pretty much just how Lethem described it in his novel—it’s a no frills neighborhood deli with much better than average sandwiches. So go get a turkey on a kaiser with lots of mustard and think about how, as much as Cobble Hill has changed since Motherless Brooklyn was published in 1999, some things stay the same. And, luckily, this sandwich is one of them.
Ziad’s Gourmet; 143 Smith Street, Cobble Hill