How did a Muslim-owned delicatessen wind up making some of New York’s best Jewish pastrami and brisket?
David’s Brisket House makes pastrami based on recipes from the 1950s. Photo by Sam Lin-Sommer
By Sam Lin-Sommer September 26, 2023
Riyadh Gazali was sitting across from me in one of his delicatessen’s wooden booths, chatting in an easy Brooklyn lilt amid the aromas of coriander, peppercorns and slow-cooking beef. As we spoke, a tall man with round cheeks and graying cornrows walked by, and Gazali greeted him. “As-salaam-alaikum” (“peace be upon you”), Gazali said.
The customer, Kamal Hakeem, fist-bumped Gazali before walking down the aisle of the long, narrow restaurant and placing his order at the counter: a breakfast of corn beef hash, home fries, beef bacon, and buttered toast for his daughter and his daughter’s hair braider.
Gazali’s restaurant, David’s Brisket House, makes some of the city’s best Jewish pastrami and brisket. But for Hakeem, a practicing Muslim who visits Katz’s Delicatessen on occasion, David’s Brisket Shop has an extra draw: it’s strictly halal.
“That’s a bridge,” Hakeem told me, knitting his fingers together to demonstrate the interweaving of Jewish and Muslim cultures, while he stood in the aisle between booths, waiting for his order. On any given weekday, Gazali, his nephew Omar, and the rest of his staff — most of whom are Mexicans and Dominicans from Catholic communities — can be found laughing and chatting with regulars like Hakeem who have stopped by for their Jewish deli fix.
According to Gazali, Eastern European Jews opened the shop on the other side of Bedford Stuyvesant’s busy Nostrand Avenue in the 1950s, when a Russian Jew named David slung cured, roasted, and smoked meats for what was once a significant Jewish population in the surrounding area. In the 1970s, Gazali’s uncle, Hamood Almas, worked in a bagel store in the shop’s current location, which was owned by a Yemenite Jew.
When the Jewish deli owners across the street put their business up for sale, Almas offered to buy it, on one condition: The owner would teach him the Jewish art of curing, smoking, and roasting meat. Gazali thinks that the former owners likely trusted his uncle after years of working across the street from each other, and that Almas, a smart businessperson, knew that mastering their cooking traditions would be key to continuing the deli’s success.
In 1980, Almas moved David’s Brisket House to its current location, a narrow space full of synthetic pothos plants and mouth-watering photos of stuffed sandwiches. In 2010, Gazali, who grew up in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn bought a share of the shop with his brother. Today, customers trek to the store from all over the tri-state area, some with memories of when the shop was under Jewish ownership.
“My father used to bring me here since the ’90s,” said a muscled young man who commuted in from Long Island . He was waiting for a large brisket sandwich that would fuel him for an afternoon of work on the nearby Long Island Railroad. “If we’re in the city, we’ll either go to Katz’s or we’ll go to Carmine’s, but in Brooklyn: David’s Brisket.”
On a recent visit, my friend, a Jewish woman from Long Island, tried the namesake sandwich. On the first bite, she cried out, “This is better than my grandpa’s brisket!”
The brisket in question is marbled and buttery. When tucked between slices of rye bread and dunked in its own gravy, the sandwich just about melts.
The pastrami is no joke, either. The thin, pink slices of cured meat sing with sharp, smokey, peppery flavor over the gentle caress of rendered fat.
Gazali sources this meat from a halal slaughterhouse in New Jersey. Halal translates to “permissible” in Arabic and means that food has been prepared according to Islamic law. Halal meat must come from a healthy animal that was killed quickly and humanely. Halal butchers can stun animals before killing them, are required to be Muslim, and have to say a particular blessing before every slaughter, but otherwise, they follow practices that are very similar to their kosher counterparts. In fact, Gazali, Hakeem, and many other American Muslims often turn to kosher meat to fulfill their halal dietary requirements.
Still, a significant number of Muslims only eat meat that has been certified halal, so in 2012, Gazali gave up the humanely slaughtered, but not kosher- or halal-certified, meat that he had been using in favor of strictly halal beef.
The shop’s halal-certified, kosher-style sandwiches have been a blessing for some Muslim New Yorkers who have wanted to try Jewish deli for years. “I have people that come in, they’re like, ‘Thank god it’s halal because now I can actually eat it,’” Gazali said.
Muslims make up about a fifth of Gazali’s clientele, he estimates, and the majority of his customers are Black — some are Black Muslims — a reflection of Bedford Stuyvesant, an area known for its historic African American and Afro-Caribbean communities. Around a third of the shop’s clientele are neither Black nor Muslim, but “from everywhere” else, he says. Some of them are Jewish. Most Orthodox Jews, though, do not patronize his shop (or Katz’s, for that matter) because his meat is not Kosher certified.
“Muslims and Jews have always lived side by side,” Gazali says. In the past, he and his wife participated in interfaith meetings with Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist groups during Ramadan as part of the Muslim American Society. In 2017, in response to former President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, Gazali hosted a series of pastrami and brisket dinners that raised funds for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a major refugee resettlement organization.
Today, the rigors of commuting to Brooklyn from Long Island and raising his two young children leave him little time to host these types of events. But he still says that he views David’s Brisket House as a place of cultural exchange.
“I’m a Muslim guy, and I do consider myself a practicing Muslim. And then on top of that, I do consider myself an American. And on top of that, I’m selling a Jewish product,” he said. “I’m very happy and proud to do what I’m doing. Because I feel like I’m bringing all three cultures together, in one tiny space.”
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