Zaftigs

The name means "plump"; the food is light. Go figure. Welcome to a traditional deli for the '90s.

by Robert Nadeau

335 Harvard Street (Coolidge Corner), Brookline; 975-0075
Open Sun - Thurs, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Fri and Sat, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
AE, DC, Di, MC, Visa
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access

Zaftigs (no apostrophe, inexplicable dot above the a) is the latest and most successful attempt at a contemporary Jewish-American delicatessen in Coolidge Corner. The strange, ungrammatical use of the Yiddish adjective zaftig ("pleasingly plump and full-figured") presages an uncertainty with the concept: what Zaftigs serves -- albeit successfully -- is slimmed-down versions of classic deli delights.

There is something shocking about nouvelle Jewish food, but there shouldn't be. All peasant cuisines derive flavor and fillingness from combinations of fat and starch that don't quite fit today's lifestyle. With French and Italian food, streamlined versions of the classics are what diners have come to expect. And Boston has also seen modernization come to such unlikely cuisines as Russian (Café St. Petersburg), Cuban (Mucho Gusto), and Korean (Jae's).

As at St. Petersburg and Mucho Gusto, the food here is often superb, flagging only when the flavor of fat is crucial to the dish. Take the basic corned-beef and pastrami sandwiches, for example. The Romanian pastrami ($7.50) is very good, but perhaps a little bit too lean. I happened to be eating at Rubins, the last great kosher deli in Boston, a few days after my last visit to Zaftigs, so I had a chance to revisit what I have always considered the best pastrami sandwich east of greater New York City. The Rubins Romanian is leaner than it used to be, but it still has vital nuances of smoke and spice that cannot be conveyed in an ultra-lean pastrami sandwich such as the one here. Corned beef ($7.95), which ought to be lean, was superlatively so at Zaftigs, but another nuance was off: it was served cold. This is easily corrected, however -- the pastrami, after all, was decently warm.

Then you get to the grilled Reuben sandwich ($7.95), a delicately balanced, non-kosher construction of corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, Russian dressing, and butter-grilled slices of dark rye. The Zaftigs Reuben has wonderful corned beef, warm and delicious, which dominates the sauerkraut (a common error) and the token dressing (an uncommon error). So you get a superlative corned-beef sandwich, but not a classic Reuben sandwich.

A nontraditional sandwich, whitefish salad ($7.95), is terrific, in part because it has such a high ratio of fish to creamy filler. If you like smoked whitefish, it just doesn't get any better. The only sandwich I didn't like was a roast turkey breast ($7.95) -- obviously sliced from a home-roasted turkey, because it had neither the uniform texture nor the brined-turkey flavor of the commercial product, but disappointingly dry. This, too, could be all fixed by the time you read this review.

All sandwiches bring an excellent half-sour pickle and a choice of side dishes. The slaw with celery seeds is very good, but a little distracting to us traditionalists. Potato salad was likewise gussied-up, but the potatoes were unforgivably undercooked on one visit. French fries are seasoned and pretty good.

Appetizers range from cheese blintzes to wood-grilled portobello mushrooms: customers who so desire it can commit the ultimate sacrilege of "grazing" in a delicatessen. And you can take the edge off your hunger with the complimentary fried bagel chips and chopped-olive cheese dip. We tried the chicken soup ($1.95 cup; $2.95 bowl), with both noodles and matzo balls, which was good. But again, some people are accustomed to the extra flavor provided by a few floating disks of fat, and a lot of people are accustomed to fattier, heavier, tastier matzo balls. Borscht ($1.95/2.95) is served hot or cold; I'd recommend cold, as the broth is no more intense than canned, although the long strips of beet are clearly home-cut. A special salad of smoked trout with raspberries, blueberries, and roasted nuts evoked the best of the Pacific Northwest without at all breaking the mood.

Zaftigs also has wood-grilled burgers, a variety of hot dogs, and real dinners -- again, ranging from the traditional (brisket of beef) to the local (broiled scrod) to the heretical (smoked pork chop). We had wood-grilled flank steak ($12.95), a tasty cut that stood up to the blue cheese sprinkled on top, although the salt total went over my personal limit. The side dish with this was mashed potatoes, a little gluey between the big lumps (usually it's one problem or the other, but not both), but adequately garlicked and just buttery enough. Chicken in a pot ($9.95) brought out the Yankee side of my hyphenated background, with a peppery broth surrounding chunks of parsnip, turnip, carrot, and onions and a token matzo ball.

Beer makes more sense with this food than wine does, but we never got past the sodas (including all extant canned flavors of Dr. Brown's) and the honest iced tea. Flamboyant desserts are a unique habit of Boston delis, and the best-known Coolidge Corner deli -- Jack and Marion's, whose success in the '50s and '60s still lures entrepreneurs back for try after try -- set the stage. The Zaftigs dessert list is sensibly restrained in both attitude and price. The real winner was the sorbet of the day ($2.95), a rich mango sorbet that was true to the flavor of the ripe fruit. Coffee ice cream ($2.95) was also homemade, and close to the standard of the sorbet. And the cheesecake ($3.95) is wisely un-zaftig in size, yet fresh and satisfying. Apple-cranberry crisp ($3.95, and another dollar à la mode) was everything but crisp. Still, I rather liked it when I thought of it as a version of Yankee Indian pudding with apples.

Service at Zaftigs is good when the place is busy, but a little confused when it's nearly empty in mid-afternoon. The only zaftige menschen in the house appeared in the wall art -- stereotypical Yiddishe mammes and such, portrayed with a postmodern, Botero-like directness. The name of the restaurant implies sentimentality, but the pictures show fat people and plump people doing shtetl kinds of things, without the sentimentality for that community that has overlain all visual portrayal of such scenes since the Holocaust. It's as if the name says "Come and kvell with us," but the wall art says "So grow up, already!"

On the whole, Zaftigs is the most extreme revision of Jack and Marion's since it closed, and thus the most likely to succeed with the wider variety of customers that now troop through Coolidge Corner. Only the outsize name doesn't fit.