Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
We were sad to see the news that on June 11, One Market Restaurant will be closing after 32 years serving downtown San Francisco. I wrote about it in this column on its 30th anniversary two years ago.
The news of its closure propelled a J. reader, Ann Solomon, to share the following story with us.
During the second year of the pandemic, Solomon placed a Passover order with One Market after reading about the restaurant’s offerings in J. When they told her she lived too far away for delivery, she responded that she couldn’t get there herself, as she was 94 years old. Given her age, they said they would make an exception and deliver to her out in the avenues. When the food came, she tried to tip the driver, to no avail.
“I’m the owner, I can’t take your money,” Michael Dellar told her.
That was the beginning of a friendship that has continued to this day, with Solomon and her grandson becoming regular guests at the Dellar family seder.
“When we announced our closure, Ann was the first outreach I made,” Dellar told J. “These kinds of stories are why I’ve enjoyed being in the hospitality business for the past 45 years.”
Not only did One Market start a Jewish deli pop-up during the Covid pandemic called Mark n’ Mike’s, it also hosted many of J.’s Hanukkah parties over the years and was a regular and longtime advertiser.
In announcing the closure via newsletter, the One Market team noted that the original founder is turning 80 (Dellar, who opened the place with chef Bradley Ogden in 1993) and pointed to the awards and accolades over the years. The message closed with: “We may be moving on, but we truly are leaving our hearts in San Francisco.”
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Chef David Nayfeld will be making an appearance at the JCCSF to promote his new cookbook “Dad, What’s for Dinner?” (An event at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto has been postponed, with no new date as of this writing.)
The book, co-written with Joshua David Stein, has an amusing subtitle: “Lifesaving Recipes to Avoid Meltdowns, Have Fun in the Kitchen, and Keep Your Kids Well-Fed,” and it promises to offer practical and time-saving tips to make meals that kids will love. The foreword was written by actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
In the introduction, Nayfeld writes about the high-stakes kitchens he’s worked in and then admits, “And still, when my daughter Helena asks, ‘Dad, what’s for dinner?’ it gets me every time.”
We wrote about Nayfeld in this column for the first time in 2018 when he opened Che Fico, an upscale Italian restaurant in San Francisco with an Italian Jewish section on the menu. The son of Jewish immigrants from Belarus, he grew up in Alameda.
In the book, he talks about how, as a single father, he learned that involving his daughter in the cooking made her much likelier to eat whatever they made. He also includes a personal afterword not usually found in cookbooks, in which he shares how much he has been helped by therapy and his Jiu-Jitsu practice, and that he had to learn how to express his feelings.
Nayfeld considers making your own pasta a great cooking project to do with your kids. (Other parents probably would beg to differ.) Frying in schmaltz is one of the odes to Jewish cooking in the book, which includes his version of chicken nuggets and a “Jew-ish” fried chicken recipe in which he coats the chicken with matzah meal before frying.
“This chicken would fill my grandmother with naches,” he writes (followed on the next page by a recipe for fennel and calabrian chili-roasted pork rib rack). Many of the recipes are vegetarian or “kosher by ingredient” — meaning every required ingredient can be substituted with a kosher version — but this isn’t a kosher book by any means. Nayfeld’s chicken soup recipe includes butter, and there’s a handful of shrimp and pork dishes.