Every day at the Deli King Gourmet Kosher Restaurant, owner Eric Newman is vividly reminded of his late grandmother.
That because the restaurant is still serving recipes his grandmother put on the menu when his father and mother, Arnold and Linda, took over the Lake Success Mall eatery 23 years ago. And that’s a great source of satisfaction for him.
“I just like serving my grandmother’s food. She taught me to cook,” Newman said of his grandmother, who still kept her hand in the restaurant operation until shortly before her death several months ago.
In fact, among the daily panini specials on the menu is Grandma’s Corned Beef Ruben. And the menu includes the traditional delicatessen restaurant fare of everything from matzoh ball soup to corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, and beyond that, salads including turkey waldorf.
As recently as five years ago, Grandma Siden, as she was known was still on the job every day.
“If she didn’t like the way something tastes, she’d go right down to the cook,” he recalled.
Until four years ago, Newman’s brothers Brian and Chuck were also working in the business. His aunt, Judy, still mans at the restaurant cash register.
Apart from his satisfaction in maintaining his family’s legacy, the 42-year-old Newman take pleasure from the relationships he has with his customers, many of whom are regulars at Deli King.
“I just enjoy interacting wiht the customers. Everyone has a story. You see the same faces every year,” he said.
The ambience has changed a bit since the restaurant first opened 40 years ago. It has the clean lines of a modern delicatessen, well-lit with abstract paintings hanging on the walls above the restaurant’s booths.
The Deli King Web site (www.deliking.us) is another step into a contemporary business mode for the restaurant, which accepts orders by the fax number posted online with its menu.
The client base has changed too, according to Newman, who notes that there used to be a larger Jewish population in the area. But Deli King draws customers from a broad geographic are that includes Nassau and Queens County residents.
“It’s much more of a mixed crowd than it used to be. Thank God people still seek out New York corned beef,” he said.
Catering has always been a part of his business, but that aspect of the business has grown considerably over the past several years with no parameters on the scale of the occasion.
“We do everything from sandwich platforms for five to ten people, to events for 500 people,” he said.
In recent years, Deli King catered fund-raising events for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine during their respective campaigns for the senate.
It’s a business that keeps Newman well occupied “pretty much seven days a week,” but he still finds some time for leisure activities.
A Great Neck native who was graduated from Great Neck North, he now lives in Plainview where he’s been coaching soccer for the teams his two daughters, Amanda and Samantha, play on for the last seven years.
“You have to try to find time for other things,” Newman said.
He’s also an avid New York Yankees and Giants fan, and also enjoys playing racquetball and tennis.
