A Preserved Delicacy
Russ & Daughters has endured for four generations on a rapidly changing Houston Street, by serving the flavor of an older New York to the new Lower East Side.
A petite dark-haired woman wearing a white lab coat with a nametag pops out of a doorway, keys in hand and a bounce in her step. She makes a tight right turn and enters quickly into the neighboring door of Russ & Daughters smoked fish shop, greeting the small crowd that has gathered on a Friday morning 15 minutes before the shop’s scheduled opening. Though her commute consists of two steps on the sidewalk out front of her home and business, Niki Russ Federman has a tough job. Federman, 30, represents the fourth generation of the shop’s ownership and the bridge between Russ & Daughters’ past and present.
Russ & Daughters, at 179 Houston between Orchard and Allen, is the Lower East Side’s resident smoked fish shop. It specializes in hand-sliced salty salmon, doughy “New York” bagels, cream cheeses and home-baked sweets, and has been a fixture of the neighborhood for four generations of Russes. The air inside the shop is thick, warm and pungent, with more than a hint of the herring, salmon and sable housed in neat shelves behind those glass cases. Stacked high with colorful fruits, the windowsills overflow with dried apricots, peaches and prunes. Long belts of dried Polish mushrooms dangle from the ceiling.
Running her family business is Niki Federman’s whole life—and she enjoys it. On the street in front of the entrance, she chats with the UPS man about his delivery of cartons of fruit, then pauses to answer a question about the shop’s history she overhears from a passerby.
She is committed to continuing the traditions of family members before her, including her father, Mark Russ Federman, as well as her grandmother and great-grandfather. Russ & Daughters is one of a handful of shops on the Lower East Side to demonstrate such staying power—an infrequent occurrence in the neighborhood and in New York City. It is a piece of the past and a glimpse into the immigrant Jewish community that once was.
This Friday morning, like most, is busy and the small shop is filled with people and the din of the fish business. Two young men, who arrived by taxi, gaze up at the extensive menu, silenced by the number of choices. They step back to watch and learn as an old pro sneaks up on the side of the counter, pointing to the fattest chubs in the case. While the man watches closely as Herman Vargas, Russ & Daughters’ long-time store manager, slices his lox and wraps up his whitefish in white wax paper, he reminisces about his 64 years as a customer. The men behind the counter recognize his face each time he comes in and they smile at his consistent requests. He leans down and whispers about a time 15 years ago when he came in and ordered “a quarter pound of novie, sliced thin enough to feed 14 people,” to the laughter of customers and proprietors alike.
During a rare break in her day, Federman grabs her own lunch: today, it’s a bagel with cream cheese and lox and a lime green can of Dr. Brown’s Ginger Ale—the same color as her eyes. Federman eats from the shop every single day, sometimes for more than one meal. She doesn’t have a favorite sandwich or dish, but she tries to eat something different every day. Usually, she has lunch upstairs in her apartment—her sanctuary away from the bustle and business of the store. Still, she can smell the rugelach being baked in the shop’s kitchen—one of the same smells her grandmother and the rest of her family lived with almost a century ago.
“I think Russ & Daughters has embodied continuity, which is a real rarity in New York where everything changes so quickly,” Federman says. “To have a place that’s been there for so long, and has stuck to a certain way of doing things, a certain quality, is really powerful.”
On the streets of the Lower East Side, Russ & Daughters’ continuity is growing more unique and more obvious. The shop is a one-story neighbor to giant Whole Foods Market, which opened last year and spans an entire block between Bowery and Chrystie Streets. Russ & Daughters’ small neon sign decorated with green and yellow fish seems vastly understated and reminiscent of a street scene from the 1920s or 1930s—or even the 1990s.
Federman’s shop can coexist with the Goliath down the block because it offers something Whole Foods doesn’t. “People know that they can come here and have the same experience and memories that they had growing up and coming here,” Federman says. “We have a lot of customers who come in every morning for their coffee and their daily schmooze. It is unique coming to a place where they feel recognized and people know them in a city where we’re mostly anonymous. Despite all the changes and the development and the history, I think we’re one place that you can go that’s been here throughout, that has sort of survived the whirlwind around it. It’s like a little haven.”
The salad is still a smooth blend of mostly whitefish, with some baked salmon, and the moist chocolate babka is prepared by the shop’s kitchen workers and bakers in the back kitchen, along with the other baked goods. Herring comes straight from a slew of suppliers to Russ & Daughters after it is pickled for preservation; then the Russes finish up with the flavoring process. “The different rounds of pickling take out the salt and add in the flavor,” explains Federman.
Though Whole Foods sells a variety of the items offered by Russ & Daughters, remarkably, the mom and pop business has not been affected in any significant way by the chain’s proximity. One change Federman instituted in time for the 2008 Passover holiday was a great reduction in the kinds of cheeses Russ & Daughters sells. Acknowledging that Whole Foods has a larger selection and that cheese was never a focus of the family business, Federman has decided to replace the cheese in the counter with more homemade sweets. For after Passover, the kitchen staff at Russ & Daughters worked on perfecting recipes for mandel bread—the Eastern European version of Italian biscotti—and black and white loaf.
