A Farewell to My Beloved Kosher Dairy
I’m moving to California, where no one calls me sweetheart and remembers my order
At B&H Dairy, you’re either a sweetheart, sweetheart, or a brother, brother. My guy Mike, king of the griddle, knows no other greeting. You could be a septuagenarian regular in the last of the neighborhood’s rent-controlled apartments, a hungover NYU student, or a dazed first-timer: doesn’t matter. You will be a sweetheart or a brother, and you will be taken care of.
B&H, on 2nd Avenue in the East Village, is one of New York City’s few remaining kosher dairy restaurants. Less famous than their meaty brethren, kosher delis, dairies serve hearty meat-free specialties of the Eastern European lilt — think soft cheese-filled blintzes and kugels, garnet-hued borscht and smoked fish salads. They evolved to serve the needs of the roughly 2 million Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York between 1880 and 1920, hungry for a taste of home.
Opened in 1938 in a sliver of a storefront with barely 20 seats, B&H (which stands alternately for the last names of its original owners, Abie Bergson and Jack Heller, and “Better Health”) has survived the rise and fall of 2nd Avenue’s Yiddish Broadway scene, its hippie-beatnik heyday, and a gas line explosion that leveled two neighboring buildings in 2015. It has…
