Why can't Kansas City have a deli like this?
Why can't Kansas City have a delicatessen like Shapiro's Delicatessen in my hometown of Indianapolis? When it comes to barbecue, Kansas City has it all over Indianapolis, which never really embraced smoked meats the way this river city has over the decades. And Kansas City has better steakhouses, too.
But as far as delicatessens go, Kansas City comes up short-handed.
Back in the Pendergast era, Kansas City was more of a deli town; the Kansas City directories in the 1940s listed 67 delicatessens (including the Milwaukee Deli, the Chicago Deli and the Cincinnati Deli). Unless you count corporate chain delicatessens like Jason's Deli or supermarket deli counters (I don't), there's not much in the way of a classic delicatessen, like the ones you might find in New York City, Chicago or Miami -- or Indianapolis, who knew?
Shapiro's has hardly changed over the last century. In fact, it looks amazingly like it did when I was a kid in the 1960s, when sliding my tray down the restaurant's cafeteria line was a really big thing. Desserts were up at the front (dangerous for me because I wanted all of them) and then the hot foods in the middle. If you wanted a sandwich, you called it out. You still do.
On my annual pilgrimage to Shapiro's last week, I ordered the Swiss
steak dinner, because I had never tasted it before. I loved it.
I had to have a potato pancake, too, a fluffy disc of mashed spuds as big as a 1960s ashtray, fried crispy and golden brown. All the dinners come with thick slices of rye bread and butter and a dill pickle. I ate all of that, too, and a side of baked macaroni and cheese and a thick slab of devil's food with a layer of cheesecake in the middle and generously iced with fudgy frosting.
On second thought, maybe it's a good thing that there isn't a place
like Shapiro's Delicatessen in Kansas City -- I'd weigh 300 pounds! -- By Charles Ferruzza
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