By John Burton
RED BANK – For Susan Shapiro, food means family, tradition and comfort.
That’s especially the case for the kind of food Shapiro plans to serve – so much a part of her cultural heritage – when she opens for business on Broad Street in the coming month or so.
Shapiro and her business partners are preparing to open Shapiro’s New York Style Delicatessen, at 51 Broad St. It is the former location of the relatively short-lived ChikyBoom restaurant and before that, No Joe’s Café.
“It’s a great location,” said Shapiro. “A lot of traffic walking by.”
Food, for her, inspires memories and tales told by her relatives over the years. “My New York roots go deep,” she said. Her family originally hailed from Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “As a little Jewish girl growing up, any family gathering was about the food.” She hopes to deliver that tradition to her customers. “For me it’s the highest level of comfort food there is.
“No wonder next to Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday is Passover. Go figure?” she said.
Shapiro is a single mom. Her grown son, Dylan, lives and works in San Francisco. Her daughter Sage, is a 17-year-old senior at Red Bank Regional High School in Little Silver. She grew up in Westchester County, New York, but had been living for a number of years in Newtown, Connecticut. A few years ago she moved to Red Bank to work with her brother, Peter, also a borough resident, who has a property management firm in North Jersey.
Susan Shapiro once operated a catering business, called Sue Chef. She was an early innovator of delivery dinners to people’s homes.
In Red Bank, she noticed there was something missing among the panoply of eateries and cuisines that the downtown offered: It seemed there really wasn’t a place that specialized in Jewish delicatessen food, where she could get a traditional hot pastrami sandwich with good mustard.
“Well, if nobody’s going to do it, I’m going to do it,” she said.
Her partners in the venture are her brother, her boyfriend Matt Kaplan, and businessman Dean Ross. Ross owns and operates the nearby Doc Shoppe shoe store, at 43 Broad St. He is also the co-owner of Bagel Oven on Monmouth Street.
The location will have breakfast items, including bagels, with a variety of “schmears,” and various egg sandwiches. The menu will have such traditional fare as latkes (potato pancakes), knishes, blintzes (served with sour cream, of course), and chocolate egg creams—that fizzy concoction of chocolate syrup, a little milk and seltzer born on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side and brought to perfection by more than a century of candy stores with soda fountains in Brooklyn and the other boroughs.
Shapiro’s will have a selection of sandwiches, named after family members like “The Sage,” made with meats Shapiro said will be supplied by a Kosher purveyor in Long Island and “The Susan,” a vegetarian offering with roasted vegetables, alfalfa sprouts and balsamic reduction.
She’s in the market for a pickle barrel to house traditional sour pickles. “We want to create the real environment,” she said.
Shapiro’s New York Style Delicatessen is expected to open in November and will eventually offer delivery service and catering.
