Hot Brooklyn Appetizing Shop Now Offering Deli
The popular smoked-fish store just added Jewish classics such as smoked meats, kasha varnishkes and kugel. Photograph courtesy of Shelsky’s.
Fans of Shelsky’s, the always-mobbed Brooklyn smoked-fish emporium, are getting even more to fress.
Starting today, the white-tiled appetizing shop will expand its menu to include classic deli sandwiches, Ashkenazi side dishes and meats by the pound.
“It’s something we’ve always wanted to do,” owner Peter Shelsky told the Forward. “We’ve done smoked fish for a while. Now, we want to play both sides of the News York Jewish food game.”
Shelsky’s redux had been set to open Tuesday, but “our pastrami’s still curing,” Shelsky said earlier this week. The shop will cure all of its own meats, including corned beef and tongue; revered local meat palace Fletcher’s Brooklyn Barbecue will smoke Shelsky’s pastrami exclusively.
The meats will fill classic deli sandwiches on Orwasher’s rye bread; Shelsky’s will also offer haimish side dishes like kasha varnishkes, stuffed cabbage, kishke with brown gravy and knishes. On weekends, Shelsky will even serve a “Shabbat cholent” based on his grandmother’s recipe. “It’s shtetl food to fill your belly,” Shelsky laughed.
Dessert offerings will grow as well. “We’re going to do apple strudel, and we always have rice pudding,” Shelsky said. “If you consider noodle kugel a dessert, we’ve got that too. My non-Jewish wife is like, ‘Why do you eat this as an appetizer? What’s wrong with you people?’”
Michael Kaminer is a frequent contributor to the Forward.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO