New York once had about 1,500 Jewish delis; by 2015 only 15 remained
In the 1930s New York City supported roughly 1,500 Jewish delicatessens. By 2015 just 15 were left, as supermarkets, convenience stores and fast-food chains borrowed the word deli for their own counters. The institution began in eighteenth-century Germany and reached America with immigrants in the late 1800s.
Delicatessen is German for delicacies, the plural of Delicatesse, and entered English in the late nineteenth century. Its ancestry runs back through French delicatesse and Italian delicatezza to the Latin delicatus, meaning pleasing or delightful. Modern German spells it with a k, making the c version look old-fashioned. The clipped American form deli probably dates from after the Second World War; its first known appearance is from 1948.
Munich's Dallmayr claims roots going back to 1700, when it became the first shop to bring bananas, mangoes and plums to German customers from as far away as the Canary Islands and China, and it remains Europe's largest business of its kind. England's first delicatessen, L Teroni and sons, opened in 1878 and still trades, though no longer under the founding family. In the United States the earliest delis appeared in New York in the early 1880s, serving German immigrants, and the first known advertisement using the word came from Sprague's Delicatessen in St. Louis in 1884. The first kosher deli opened in 1889 as New York's German-Jewish population grew.
The word now means very different things by country. Across Europe it signals expensive, high-quality food; German speakers also say Feinkost, and famous examples range from Fauchon in Paris to Fortnum and Mason in London. Moscow's Eliseevsky store, with its turn-of-the-century decor, survived the Soviet era as an outlet for hard-to-find delicacies. In South and Western Australia a deli can simply be a corner shop, and in Ireland the deli counter, a 1990s trend, sells chicken fillet rolls and breakfast rolls at petrol stations and newsagents.
The American deli covers everything from a grocery counter to a full restaurant, with Italian, Greek and Jewish traditions, kosher or kosher-style, and sandwiches made to order rather than from a fryer. Its commercial pull shows up in data too: a study of about 2.64 million shopping baskets in Montenegro found the delicatessen category acting as the central hub linking other purchases.
Source: Delicatessen
