Food As Immigrant Experience

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“Foods of the Lower East Side,” the  walking tour created by Adam Steinberg, is not concerned with haute cuisine. “We use food as a conduit to explain the immigrant experience because it’s so central to it,” says Steinberg, the New York Tenement Museum’s senior education associate. “What I hope is that I’m an expert in telling stories and getting other people to tell their stories. I love the context—that it’s food. It’s the conversations that lead to connections.”

Photography: 

Nick Romanenko

New York City being the mecca of  culinary sophistication that it is,  the odds of an experienced local  host serving visitors a 10-course menu  that includes pretzels and pickles are unlikely. Guests might suspect they stumbled into Charlie Brown’s hodgepodge Thanksgiving feast instead of a bona fide foodie gathering.

But “Foods of the Lower East Side,” a walking tour created by Adam Steinberg,  is not concerned with haute cuisine. “We use food as a conduit to explain the immigrant experience because it’s so central to it,” says Steinberg GSNB‘07,’14, the senior education associate at the nonprofit Tenement Museum.

The scholarly aspect of the two-hour tour, held on Fridays and Saturdays, doesn’t take away from it tastiness—or liveliness. Groups, comprising out-of-state tourists and visiting family of Lower East Side residents, assemble at the museum for afternoon strolls. Steinberg (or one of the 17 guides he’s trained) invites visitors  to recall kitchen memories, sharing an anecdote about food and how it’s part of their heritage.

“My grandmother was an Eastern European immigrant, and she didn’t do much cooking,” says Steinberg. “But my mother grew up in Los Angeles and picked up some of its unique culinary traditions. One of the first things she made was  gazpacho. When she made it for me, I  felt like I was getting a taste of her own childhood,” says Steinberg, who lives  in Manhattan.

Personal histories disseminated, the 11-stop saunter through the changing neighborhood begins with pauses in front of enduring storefronts like Di Palo Fine Foods, Vanessa’s Dumpling House, and Economy Candy. Most of the pauses are punctuated by a guide-distributed snack— a sliver of sopressata outside Di Palo’s, a bite of a chewy pretzel with spicy mustard outside the Austro-Hungarian-rooted Café Katja. Each destination merits a short speech.

“Eighty years ago, the neighborhood was dominated by Italian immigrants,” says Steinberg, reiterating a point made on the tour. “And during the last 30 years, Chinatown has expanded and become one of the more dominant cultures.” This point of interest is made outside of Vanessa’s.

Steinberg, whose idea for a cultural- history food tour germinated in 2010, says the experience of assembling one was “like a self-taught graduate seminar. I did all the reading, all the research.” After nine intensive months, the tour was launched in 2011. It has been luring the hungry and the curious ever since.

What tourists expect most is authenticity, Steinberg says. “But I want to complicate their idea of it: authenticity is not something inherent in the food itself, but rather in the relationship you have with the food. So let’s say you’re born of Dominican immigrant parents in New York City, and your mother wants to re- create a dish her mother made for her, but she doesn’t have access to queso blanco, so she uses mozzarella instead. To you, the version of the dish with mozzarella is the authentic version,” he says. 

For all the stories he’s heard and told about food, Steinberg, whose doctoral dissertation was entitled “Preserving, Planning, and Promoting the Lower East Side,” doesn’t consider himself especially food-savvy. “What I hope is that I’m an expert in telling stories and getting other people to tell their stories,” he says. “I love the context—that it’s food. It’s the conversations that make it special. They lead to connections.”