| Delancey Dessert Co. alive with culture |
By DOUG BLACKBURN
Staff writer |
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If you're visiting Manhattan, don't bother walking up and down Delancey
Street searching for Delancey Dessert Co. It's not there.
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The 16-year-old bakery is located around the corner on Grand Street. Same
Lower East Side neighborhood, but definitely a different street.
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| Who knows Grand Street, reasons Zvi Lavi, who started the bakery. Amy
Irving wasn't crossing Grand, was she? |
| Delancey is indeed the name with the cache, the street synonymous with
Yiddish theater and immigrants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. And kosher
delis and bakeries. |
| Lavi's specialty is rugelach, the pastry traditionally made with
cream-cheese dough spread with filling, such as chocolate, jam or nuts, and
then rolled. His four primary versions are chocolate, cinnamon, apricot and
raspberry. |
| "We use a special recipe, which goes down in generations, over 100 years,"
says Lavi, who immigrated to the U.S. from Israel in 1978. "We use only the
flaky dough. It's the original. It's more difficult to produce and keep it
fresh, but we always do the original only." |
| Delancey Dessert Co. has expanded its repertoire and now makes a variety of
kosher pastries, including babka, cookies, mandelbrot, cakes and swirls. But
the modestly packaged bags of rugelach are the bakery's calling card. |
| They can be found at most of the upscale food stores in the city, from Dean
& Deluca to Gourmet Garage. Lavi says he is hopeful his pastries soon will be
in Price Chopper stores. |
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"I am carrying on a tradition, keeping a culture alive through food," Lavi
adds. "Babka and rugelach and the different cakes we make, they have an
amazing history. They go back many, many generations." |
| Lavi went to work in real estate when he first arrived in New York. He
decided to start the bakery in 1990, he says, because "I was looking for a
little more excitement, something that would keep me a bit busier." |
He has no regrets. Every morning when he enters his bakery to the
intoxicating aromas of baking rugelach, he knows he made the right decision.
"It brings me memories of my childhood. My mother used to bake rugelach for
our house," he says. "Nobody takes the trouble anymore, they just buy it
ready-made."
Hopefully from Delancey Dessert Co., Lavi adds.
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