Why Pastramakah should become the next great Jewish tradition
Started in a Las Vegas bar, the celebration marries cured meats and the Festival of Lights
From right: The mascot of Pastramakah and its greatest fan, author Charles Bock. Courtesy of Charles Bock
I’d returned from New York to my hometown of Las Vegas for Christmastime, and needed to get away from my parents. Dayvid Figler (lifelong Vegas resident, friend since childhood, lawyer and former judge, now a podcaster) took me to the local institution known as The Double Down Saloon. It was the Saturday night before Christmas, 2006; we arrived with the setting sun.
The Double Down is famous locally, having hosted punk shows for 30 years, but I clearly remember that when we got there, no bands were playing; rather, we were in the aftermath. Dim bar. Something like 30 people scattered around, making small talk. People in the booths were drinking the usual beers and hard liquor, but also cans of Dr. Brown’s — root beers, creams, black cherry sodas.
I waded toward the center of the bar. Long tables were set up with trays. A few chefs with carving knives idled, discussing a point spread. I searched for some spicy mustard, heard moans of contentment, saw someone on a barstool, his belt undone, gut hanging out.
Dayvid told me the meat had been flown in, special, from Manhattan. More than a bit proud, he added: “Katz’s.”
This was my introduction to Pastramikah — perhaps you will spell it Pastramakah. Either way, the festival of salted, cured meat.
Figler coined the term, a combination of a) the shlumpy holiday created so Jewish kids wouldn’t feel jealous of Christmas, and b) the cholesterol-and-sodium-laden dried beef that clogs arteries and causes angioplasty. But the holiday itself was the brainchild of Moss, 72, a Vegas resident for 33 years, owner of the Double Down Saloons in Vegas and the East Village (as well as other bars in each city).
Moss was aware that Christmas was a legendarily dead time in the self-entertainment capital of the world. “I wanted to put on an event that was more than just a Christmas party,” he told me, via email. “Something unique and special to show appreciation for bar regulars, former regulars and friends.”
The first Pastramikah was held in 2004 on the Saturday before Christmas. Moss ordered 30 pounds of pastrami (“plus rye bread, mustard, pickles and the works”) from Katz’s Deli, the famed deli on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (known for, among other things Meg Ryan’s orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally). He guesses it cost around $1500.
“It had to be from Katz’s as it had to be the best,” Moss wrote. “Back then there was no online ordering. Phone orders would often fall through the cracks. I always sent someone (an employee from his East Village bar) in to arrange everything.”
Double Down chefs started carving starting at 1 pm; at around 2, bands began playing. The party continued well into the evening, until all the food was gone. Wayward prodigal children, bored city residents, and — of course — nomadic Jews who’d returned home and needed something to do, all found succor, as well as thick, delicious, artery-clogging sandwiches. The Double Down made back their costs via copious amounts of booze.
“I created a holiday that meant a lot to people, which meant a lot to me,” Moss wrote. He estimates the celebrations ran for 12 years, before Pastramikah ended. “Over the years people got older, had families, moved away. It got to the point where people came for free food then scrammed, with the holiday aspect relegated to history. Best to leave it as a wonderful memory.”
This could have been the end of it. Indeed, the term Pastramikah does not appear in any internet searches (“You mean search for Pastrami?” asks Google). Nor has it been copyrighted or turned into a catchy slogan for tee shirts. For all intents and purposes, Pastramakah could have been done, one more proverbial wonderful memory.
However. like eternal indigestion, like some kind of blessed, cured meat gestating through my small intestine, that shaggy evening festivity in Vegas stayed alive inside me, kindling. The following year, I put on my own version in my Gramercy Park apartment. My vegetarian wife got in on the proceedings, ordering matzo ball soup, as well as potato latkes piled with applesauce. We invited my sister’s family over. Since Eisenberg’s was less of a schlep than Katz’s, we ordered the festive meal from there, our own nascent Pastramakah tradition. Another change: my spelling. I randomly decided to use an A instead of the I favored by the Double Down.
Furthermore, where Moss (who is not Jewish) intended Pastramikah to be a non-denominational celebration for everyone, I (born to the tribe) could not separate the name from its origin holiday. I am definitively not religious, and am the type to run screaming from any political discussion of the Middle East — more of your secular, smartass Jew. And as such, I interpreted the name to be a comment on the shabby nature of the actual holiday. Indeed, I envisioned Pastramakah as an embrace of the absurd, Catskills-comic aspects of cultural Judaism. That was a holiday I could get behind.
So Hanukkah rituals were appropriated — chocolate gelt, lighting the menorah, trying to remember how to play dreidel. Funny ideas have been added over the years: How about purposefully underwhelming gifts like theme socks? Let’s listen to Sandler’s Hanukkah song, or Gary Gulmun’s stand-up set. Should we stream Seinfeld’s Festivus episode off Netflix, again, maybe try the one where George’s girlfriend says, “I find pastrami to be the most sensual of all the salted, cured meats?”
Somewhere along the line I even imagined a mascot (for the kids, of course) — a menorah rising from out of a thick sandwich. We gave him the moniker Sam The Butcher (so named after a lyrical entendre from “Shake Your Rump,” by the Beastie Boys, whose three members, if you didn’t know, were all Jews).
My older daughter was about three weeks old when she celebrated her first Pastramakah — she’s now 15 (her mom, my first wife, passed from cancer before she could celebrate one last time). My younger daughter, now six, also counts Pastramakah as a normal ritual inside my apartment. Both girls know well the sacred tale which explains this holiday miracle: Though the portion was barely enough for a snack, the pastrami nonetheless stayed inside his colon for eight nights.
Sure, when other kids at school hear about the holiday, even Jews are perplexed.
Indeed, as of this writing, my family may well be the only Pastramakah celebrants on earth.
But the doors are open! This year, the supposedly real holiday begins on December 25, Christmas Day — such a confluence!
Truly this marks the ideal time to share this fledgling tradition with our otherwise burning world. So, please, join us. Feel free to add your own rituals, spices, jokes, twists. My only suggestions: 1) make sure to order your spread in advance; 2) stock up on the Pepto-Bismol.
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