Sammy’s Roumanian Is New, But Not Really

There’s a Yiddish expression, Az me ken nit vi me vil, muz men vellen vi me ken: “If you can’t do as you wish, do what you can.” With a small edit, it works well as a tagline for Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse, now enjoying a second life on Stanton Street: If you can’t eat what you like, you may as well enjoy what there is.

G-d bless Sammy’s, for whom shivas were sat prematurely, for whom death knells were rung too soon. The original location, an institution on Chrystie Street since 1975, closed its basement-level doors in 2021. It had evolved, over its long life, from a good restaurant to a beloved one. The New York Times three-starred it in 1982, praising its stuffed derma and “satiny” broiled brains; by 2014, it had aged into both mediocrity and icon status, the “most wonderful terrible restaurant in New York.” The ceilings were low and the lighting was awful; the tables still groaned with platters of steak, kreplach, and liver, a potbellied cruet of golden shmaltz on every one. Customers drank vodka — served by the bottle rather than the glass — which arrived encased in blocks of ice. There was singing, there was dancing, and the vibe at Sammy’s up to the very end was much the same as it was, I am told, at the bat mitzvah my cousin celebrated at the restaurant in 1985.

Now Sammy’s has reopened, and though the battered metal sign that used to announce it on the street now hangs indoors, things are as they ever were. The vodka (Ketel One or Tito’s now — diners’ choice) still arrives in an ice block, whose melting sides will begin sloshing around once you’re too sloshed to care. Seltzer is still dispensed via siphon. Shmaltz still sits on every tabletop, and platters of garlicky steak, kreplach, latkes, and sausage still keep coming until you beg them to stop. (There’s no “ordering” at Sammy’s — as at a relative’s house, you just submit.) Dani Luv (né Lubnitzki) still does his musical borscht-belt patter from the back of the room, coaxing circle dances out of sozzled tables of touristing blondes and belting the classics, improving the unimprovable American songbook with tweaks like, “Jingle bells, jingle bells / Jesus was a Jew.” (This is in May, mind.) Luv, who looks like the love child of Danny DeVito and Wallace Shawn, is as much an institution as Sammy’s itself, and his patter has aged like fine slivovitz.

All is not identical. Sammy’s now finds itself at street level, though it approximates the cave quality of the original by covering its front windows. The room is long, narrow, and black, like a high-school black-box theater, albeit with some of the worst acoustics I have ever experienced in a restaurant. It was so hard to hear that everyone at my table spent the entire meal screaming in vain at one another, in the great Jewish tradition.  Luv, at least, has the benefit of a sound system. “How many Jews we got here tonight?” he bellowed at one point, before playing “If I Were a Rich Man,” from Fiddler. When the night progressed to the inevitable dance portion, he judged, accurately, “All the shiksas are dancing Jewish and all the Jews are eating.”

Oy, the eating. I think you are probably not a real New Yorker if you’ve never had chopped liver made for you tableside, your waiter smashing together gribenes, radish, onion, and a nice pour of shmaltz — “We call it a Jewish Caesar salad” — to be spread on sliced rye. Then a fried bounty: meat-filled kreplach with a sweet-and-sour orange dipping sauce, latkes, fried potatoes, a plate-size fried cutlet with a hefty scoop of mashed potatoes. A zingy stuffed cabbage. And, finally, the steak that makes Sammy’s Roumanian a steakhouse: It’s still flank, still garlicky, and now, perhaps more than before, mostly cooked to a nice rosy pink.

Sammy’s may be the last link in the chain of a proud tradition: the Jewish Romanian restaurant. Romanian immigrants came to the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century —  in smaller numbers than some of the other Eastern European cohorts, but enough that the Romanian population of the States quadrupled between 1900 and 1910, and had doubled again by 1930 — and brought their tastes with them. Time has weakened appetites for broiled brains and calf’s-foot jelly. Long gone are Moskowitz & Lupowitz, on the corner of Second Avenue and 2nd Street; the French Roumanian Restaurant on Delancey, where in the 1930s the Daily Worker noted the long hours of the unionizing waiters; and the Old Romanian at 169 Allen, “famous home of mushk steak.” (Mushk steak appears on several Romanian menus and seems to have been rib eye.) Sammy’s, at least, keeps the memory alive, if not all of the cuisine. As Luv told Grub Street, “People ask me what’s Romanian at Sammy’s, and I say, ‘The sign.’”

What, you should want more than that? Forty-nine years after its founding, Sammy’s is a tradition unto itself.

Matthew Schneier , 2024-06-13 13:00:51

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