Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
Whether chef Adam Rosenblum was cooking in other people’s restaurants or opening one himself, he worked to help others realize their visions. Now, with the opening of Super Mensch, he’s realized his own.
Even with its super Jewy name, this is not your traditional Jewish deli. Its menu is smaller, for starters. But it departs from tradition largely because of the Jewish cocktails, the most creative I’ve come across. While the food is delicious, the cocktails are the star here.
Super Mensch opened at the end of September in the Marina District, right next to Rosenblum’s other San Francisco restaurant, the farm-to-table bistro Causwells. The anticipation leading up to the opening confirmed that public interest in Jewish food is still going strong.
This isn’t Rosenblum’s first time making Jewish-themed food. The self-described “pastrami fanatic” tested a deli concept for six months in 2022 with Little Red Window, a takeout spot with a rotating menu next to his North Beach Spanish tapas restaurant Red Window. (It’s now under new ownership.) At the time, he told J. he’d been working on his pastrami recipe since 2006 — now close to 20 years.
Rosenblum, 43, who grew up in Maryland, remembers going for Jewish deli while visiting family in New Jersey. The older he got, the more nostalgic he grew for that food, and as a chef he began wanting to share it with others.
Causwells was long established — in fact, the team is opening another one soon in Menlo Park — when the eyeglass shop next door became vacant, and he and his business partner Elmer Mejicanos got the opportunity to take it over.
The space is small, the size of a studio apartment, and the kitchen is even smaller, so they knew they’d have to prepare much of the food off-site. Even so, it still hasn’t been enough to keep up with the pastrami orders. A few weeks after opening, Rosenblum said he’d rented additional kitchen space to keep up with the demand. The beloved staple deli meat can take from a week to 10 days to brine properly.
“We’re going through about 200 pounds a week, but running out,” he said two weeks after opening. “Next week, I have 400 pounds coming.”
Their flatbread and bagels — the everything bagel I tried had just the right amount of chew — and the rye bread that they make with onion pureé in the starter are all baked off-site. They also make their own cream cheese for bagels and crème fraiche to serve with the latkes. They eventually plan to cure their salmon in-house.
Chopped liver is my most nostalgic Jewish food, so I was thrilled to see it on the menu. Theirs includes the word “mousse,” so I knew it would be cheffier than the more rustic Jewish version I love, but I had no complaints. I did, however, take issue with the latke, which is square-shaped and presents more like a crispy potato kugel. It’s denser than a latke and, well, not fried. That’s because Super Mensch has no hood in its kitchen, which means frying is off limits.
Rosenblum said he expected me to have an issue with something, as he knows this type of food elicits strong opinions from people with vivid food memories.
He always knew that latkes, “one of the most identifiable Jewish American dishes,” would be on the menu. That was without question.
I give him credit for trying.
“For me, it needed to have a couple of factors: that you can taste the egg, that there’s a hint of onion, and then they need to have as crispy of an exterior as humanly possible.”
Even so, he continued, “I knew I’d get ripped apart, and that’s OK. That’s what food like this does. You’re not comparing your recipe to mine, you’re comparing your grandma’s recipe or your favorite East Coast deli, so it’s not a fair fight. Everyone has their own food memories from their grandma’s house or the place they went to growing up.”
Like the space, the Super Mench menu is quite compact. It has deli sandwiches, matzah ball soup and nosh, including flatbread with a number of dips, and a decidedly un-Jewish dish of halibut crudo (but schug as a condiment ups the Jewishness). The only dessert is devil’s food cake; one large cake is made each day and it’s served until it’s gone.
What makes Super Mensch so fun are the cocktails, which differentiate it from other Jewish delis throughout the Bay Area — and how glorious that we have several to choose from now: Wise Sons, Saul’s, Loveski, Grossman’s, Drewish and Bubbala’s. While those with full bars have Jewish cocktails, the creations at Super Mensch go above and beyond. That’s because Mejicanos, 40, has years of mixology behind him.
“It’s the magic of Elmer,” Rosenblum said. “It’s both a gift and a curse of his, that if there’s a concept he doesn’t fully connect with, he does so much research, until he feels he’s a part of it.”
While the two have dubbed their partnership “Mensch and Mejicanos,” the mensch label could easily be applied to both of them.
Mejicanos, who grew up mostly in Nicaragua, has created cocktail programs for an array of restaurants with global cuisines. But to create the Super Mensch cocktail menu, he really threw himself into Jewish food, making matzah ball soup at home, visiting Katz’s and other iconic delis when in New York, and reading as many Jewish cookbooks as he could. He has come to appreciate the comforts of Jewish deli food, he said, adding, “this is probably the best cocktail menu that I’ve ever made in 20 years… It’s my business partner’s culture, so I want to make sure that I make him proud and be excited about it.”
An egg cream cocktail, a Cel-Ray cocktail based on the deli soda and a pickle juice martini have been seen elsewhere. But the Matzah Ball Soup Margarita has to be seen and tasted to be believed. A spherical ice cube with sprigs of cilantro, dill and parsley frozen inside it sits in the middle of a coupe glass, just like a matzah ball. Extra-virgin olive oil infused with dill is added with the tiniest dropper to the drink’s surface. While Mejicanos toyed with the idea of infusing the tequila with schmaltz, he wanted vegetarians to be able to enjoy it, too. The glass rim is garnished with the thinnest, matzah-like cracker, shaped like a chicken.
There is also a Lox and Bagels Martini, made with cucumber-infused gin, caper-infused sherry, an olive stuffed with salmon roe, toasted sesame and tomato water, so that elements of the bagel platter all appear in the glass. (And yes, people do order their cocktails with the paired dish.) There is an old-fashioned inspired by babka with orange zest and a piece of chocolate on the side. My favorite, though, was a play on borscht, combining several spirits with beet juice, pickled beets, ginger, poppy seeds and a mint garnish. Not only did its bright fuchsia color remind me of my grandmother’s summer borscht, but the flavor was exceptional.
When I asked Rosenblum how he felt about putting himself out there with a Jewish-forward restaurant now, during an uneasy time for Jews, he said he wasn’t trying to make any kind of statement, he just wanted to represent the food he loves. Given the public’s response, others are loving it, too.
Mejicanos, too, said, “we wanted to build a place for everyone. Our concept is Jewish American, but it’s very much geared toward the cocktails that might be inspired by Jewish dishes or Jewish flavors. They’re still modern cocktails that people should enjoy just because they are what they are.”
Super Mensch, 2336 Chestnut St., S.F. Open for lunch and dinner daily except Monday. Reservations recommended. Check the website for hours, which vary daily.
Getting my kasha fix
During the High Holidays, I was missing my late parents and grandparents even more than usual. My prescription? Dinner at Saul’s Deli in Berkeley.
I headed there with some of my cousins thinking I would order the brisket, the dish that my beloved mother most often made this time of year. But I was thrilled to find a dinner entrée of kasha varnishkes — buckwheat groats, typically served with bowtie pasta. I’m not sure I ever noticed it on the menu before, which is strange, since when I called Saul’s co-owner Sam Tobis afterward, he told me it had been on the menu for years.
“Varnishkes” is a Yiddish adaptation of the Ukrainian “varenyky,” a kind of dumpling, and here it refers to the pasta. In addition to the grains and pasta, kasha varnishkes always includes fried onions, and can be made either vegetarian or with schmaltz. There’s not a lot to kasha, yet its earthy nuttiness distinguishes it from all other grains.
It’s one of those Jewish dishes that I love but doesn’t seem to be much in vogue anymore. Maybe in home kitchens, but certainly not in our local Jewish delis.
Admittedly, it can never compete with popular deli fare like pastrami. And it’s also one of those humble dishes I could easily make myself but never do. Yet kasha reminds me of family. And I loved that I could order it as a main entrée with a side of brisket, instead of the other way around.
At Saul’s the pasta was corkscrew-shaped — and no doubt made with local heirloom flour — and the dish was topped with a fried egg, definitely different from my memories, and served in a small cast-iron pan. Saul’s is known for its sourcing, and Tobis told me the only bowties they could find weren’t up to their standards, so they went with something else. (Of course, they frequently hear about that from their customers.)
After my night at Saul’s, I checked all the menus of our local Jewish restaurants, and not one had kasha varnishkes on the menu. When I told Tobis, he wasn’t surprised.
“Even though kasha isn’t creative in invention, there is something creative in having it on the menu,” he said. “It’s a shtetl-ly, old-school dish that we’re hopefully keeping relevant.”
On an average week, Tobis said about 25 people order the kasha plate. He considers it “more of a sleeper hit.” Saul’s also uses kasha in its turkey stuffing recipe on Thanksgiving and in its smoked turkey special every Sunday and Monday throughout the year.
I went and looked for kasha varnishkes in some of my Jewish cookbooks: “Eat Something,” the Wise Sons cookbook from 2020, didn’t have it, while Joan Nathan’s classic “Jewish Cooking in America” (that I inherited from my mom) from 1994 had quite a bit about it. “The Gefilte Manifesto” from 2016 included it, both as a dish with bowties and crispy Brussels sprouts, and as a knish filling.
The cookbook research confirmed my sense that kasha varnishkes are more of an East Coast thing. (If you, dear readers, have thoughts on this, or you still regularly make kasha, I’d love to hear about it.)
As an aside, I realized in my conversation with Tobis how much fun it is to say the word “kasha.” So I’ve decided that I want our next dog to be brown so I can name it Kasha.
Tobis believes that Saul’s former chef-owner Peter Levitt came up with the idea to include the fried egg, and that he also recognized the intelligence of offering the kasha varnishkes with a side of brisket for those who still eat meat but just want less of it.
Together with the not-bowtie noodles, the fried egg and side of brisket, Tobis said it was a kasha variation that his grandmother might not recognize, “but she would be happy to know it’s on the menu.”