It may not be the first time that a business can be had for a song, but it’s a novelty for San Francisco’s oldest kosher-style deli, Shenson’s, which has proudly defied innovation for 65 years.
With a little mazel, your song, poem or essay on the topic of “Why I should own Shenson’s,” and a $100 entry fee will win you the chance to carry on the deli tradition.
“So few people have done [such a contest] that it’s still fun, new and different,” Shenson’s proprietor Alexandra Allen said. “It will breathe new life into the place.”
Allen’s contest will run for three months — it started Monday — but if she does not receive 1,500 entries, the challenge will be called off and the entry fees refunded, she said.
If all goes smoothly, Allen will interview 10 finalists and a winner will be announced in November.
This time next year, the restaurateur, 52, wants to be sunning herself on an Israeli beach with visions of a future bakery dancing in her head.
Allen says her business is no gold mine, but she manages to make a living from it. She contends that the potential for increasing profits lies in developing the catering business.
“Without a partner, I have not had time and resources to do that,” she said.
Allen decided not to sell Shenson’s the conventional way after watching the Bay Area restaurant market falter in recent years. Anxious for a change of pace, the deli owner knew she couldn’t wait for the market to rebound. The contest’s entry fees would earn Allen $150,000, which is about what the business is worth, she said.
Allen fondly recalled buying Shenson’s from one of the original partners 10 years ago.
“It took 10 months to buy this place. It was like having a baby. [Former owner Harry Goldman] wanted to retire but he didn’t want to let go of the place. He was skeptical of me because I had never been in the business.”
Her patience paid off, and Goldman left satisfied that even the Shenson’s pickle recipe would remain intact.
Despite the urge to pull out, Allen anticipates the same trouble letting go, having become accustomed to the daily rhythms of lunchtime noshers and the passages of Jewish holidays.
“I won’t miss the stress of preparing for Passover. It’s like preparing for a play, but then you get to the performance, and it’s over,” she said.
Still, “when people are happy with food, there’s nothing more gratifying.”
Many customers would have to agree. Some are fourth-generation regulars, whose great-grandparents frequented the original Shenson’s Kosher Market. The first store opened in 1897 on MacAllister Street in the then-heavily Jewish Western Addition.
Irving Berman, a cousin working for founder Aaron Shenson, took the market’s deli business and moved to the present location at 5120 Geary Blvd. Goldman, a longtime employee, became his partner in 1971.
The deli has not changed much over the years. Nestled among retail stores in the largely Asian and heavily Russian Richmond District, it holds only a handful of tables. An old-fashioned meat counter runs the length of the shop, stocked full of salads, fish, cheeses and meats. Kosher and kosher-style foods line the walls. An impressive selection of Israeli, Californian and French kosher wines is displayed in black wire racks.
Joe Berkofsky, a Jewish Bulletin editor and three-year city resident, says he found Shenson’s a handy resource of Yiddishkeit. He last visited on Christmas day, seeking a kosher lunch for his observant sister and brother-in-law.
“We sat down with some sandwiches, pickles and cream soda, when a young Jewish guy sat down near us, alone, with a bowl of matzah ball soup,” Berkofsky said.
The brother-in-law, jokingly, asked the youth what he was eating.
“The kid laughed and we asked him to join us. In about 90 seconds, my sister had gotten his entire life story and was trying to fix him up with her oldest daughter — who lives on the East Coast,” he said.
“It seemed like a perfectly Jewish San Franciscan way to spend Christmas.”
Allen hopes the deli’s Jewish tradition and community role are not forgotten amid the excitement of the contest, a novel concept that is relatively new to the West Coast.
A New Hampshire bed-and-breakfast is said to be the first to employ such a marketing scheme, designed to match the appraised value of a business.
Filmmakers borrowed the concept in last year’s “The Spitfire Grill,” in which the staff of a small New England diner decides to hold a contest to get rid of the eatery.
The contest scheme has spread throughout the East as a gutsy alternative to waiting out a flagging real estate market. The beer brewer, Guinness, has employed a similar contest to give away brew pubs in Ireland.
The scheme landed in San Francisco last spring, when the proprietor of San Francisco’s Korso Restaurant on Bryant Street got in on the act, hoping that someone would take over the struggling South-of-Market cafe faster than he could sell it. The Korso contest concludes July 31.
Allen claims she first conceived of the contest a couple years ago, and was surprised that Korso beat her to the draw, so to speak.
“I had heard of the bed-and-breakfast in New Hampshire when I thought of it. I explored [to see] if it was legal in California,” she said, and it was.