Here’s hoping the book is as good as the review. Ever on the lookout for a fun read for Shofar readers, what should appear in a recent Dwight Garner review in The New York Times but Ben Katchor’s The Dairy Restaurant.

            Katchor’s new book is a love song to the American dairy restaurant that flourished in the Lower East Side in the late 1800’s. Here, Katchor offers descriptions of the milekhdike cuisine and an homage to potato knishes, borscht, cheese kreplekh, kasha varnishkes, pirogen, blintzes, and poppy seed cakes. While the restaurants have mostly vanished, their cultural and culinary history have not. As part of the fun, Katchor lists the famous and infamous who frequented these establishments, such as, yes, Leon Trotsky for one, also Edward G. Robinson, Franz Kafka, Emma Goldman, Theodore Bikel, Arthur Miller, Bert Lahr, Frank Zappa, Leonard Bernstein, and blacklisted screenwriters who came to salve their souls.